Research Group: Language Comprehension and Production

The Representation of Negated States of Affairs Barbara Kaup Issue. The focus is on how negative sentences such as Mary bakes no bread are mentally represented. According to propositional theories, bread is represented but not well available because enclosed by the negation operator. According to the mental model approach not the linguistic form but the described situation is relevant. Bread, not being present in the described situation, is not represented in the mental model and therefore not well available.

In GrKK since 11/94 as Ph.D. student

Goal: The goal is to empirically decide between the two representational hypotheses, i.e., whether the linguistic form of negative sentences or the described situation is relevant.

Fig. 1. Availability of concepts measured by means of the probe-recognition task

Method: Subjects read coherent narrative texts including negative sentences. After reading each text the availability of the relevant concepts was measured by means of the probe- recognition task. Sentences such as Mary bakes cookies but no bread were compared with sentences such as Elisabeth burns the letters but not the photographs. According to the propositional theory negated entities (bread, photographs) should be less available than non-negated entities (cookies, letters), whereas according to the mental model theory entities absent from the situation described (bread, letters) should be less available than entities present (cookies, photographs).

Results: Availability is a function of whether or not an entity is negated and of whether or not an entitiy is absent from the situation described (see Fig. 1). It thus seems as if for the probe-recognition task a propositional representation as well as a mental model is used.