The processing of negatives during discourse comprehension

This paper investigates the effects of negation in discourse comprehension. The paper is based on the finding by MacDonald and Just (1989) that after reading sentences such as Elizabeth bakes some bread but no cookies subjects are faster to respond to the probe bread than to the probe cookies. The question arises whether this differential availability of the relevant concepts is due to negation, or whether it reflects the fact that a bread is present in the described situation, whereas cookies are not. In order to decide between these alternatives two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1 negated entities that are absent from the described situation were compared with non-negated entities that are present, whereas in Experiment 2 negated entities that are present in the situation were compared with non-negated entities that are absent. The results of the two experiments indicate that both factors, namely 'negation' and 'absence from situation', affect the availability of concepts during discourse processing.