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Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Activation of negated and non-negated entities

Kevin S. Autry *, William H. Levine *
Memorial Hall 216, Department of Psychology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, United States
Received 25 January 2012; received in revised form 23 May 2012; accepted 14 June 2012

Abstract
Three experiments were conducted to investigate the activation of negated concepts in the mental representation of sentences.
Subjects read short passages ending with a sentence that did or did not negate the second of two direct objects: Justin bought a mango
but not an apple/and an apple. The prior context was manipulated such that it either licensed the negation or not. After reading, subjects
wrote a continuation. These were coded for whether they referred to Noun1 or Noun2. In the first two experiments, when the context did
not license the negation, Noun2 was written about more often when it was negated than when it was non-negated. But in the third
experiment, when the negation was licensed, Noun2 was written about equally often in both conditions. These findings suggest that non-
licensed negation draws attention to the negated concept resulting in the negated concepts becoming more active than non-negated
concepts.
Published by Elsevier B.V.

Keywords: Negation; Context-effects; Suppression; Activation

1. Introduction

Negation presents an interesting set of challenges to theories of representation, including those in the areas of formal
semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive psychology. The question we address in this paper is related to how negated entities
are represented when they appear in contexts that do or do not previously mention (or even allow an easy existential
inference about) the negated entity. That is, we examined how the apple in the sentence like Justin bought a mango but
not an apple is represented as a function of whether the apple has appeared in the previous discourse.
From a semantic point of view, for a sentence that contains negation, such as (1),

(1) Jones does not own a Porsche.

one key issue is how to represent the sentence so that its truth value may be determined (cf. Russell, 1905). Kamp and
Reyle's (1993) Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) provides one solution to this by representing the predicate in a
substructure that has a negation operator attached to it, as depicted in Fig. 1. In the discourse world, there is only an
explicit representation of Jones. Thus, if Jones in reality does own a Porsche, this mismatches the discourse
representation and thus the sentence is false. Furthermore, Kamp and Reyle argue that the information in the negated
substructure is ‘‘inaccessible’’ (p. 105) as a referent (e.g., Jones does not own a Porsche. He likes it.). The placement of
the predicate, and in particular the direct object (i.e., a Porsche), in this substructure, and its consequent inaccessibility,
might be hypothesized to have psychological consequences for the representation of the negated entity. Based on this
hypothesis, Kaup (2001) argued that entities represented in this substructure, that is, those that are not part of the

* Corresponding authors. Tel.: +1 479 575 5816.

E-mail addresses: ksautry@uark.edu (K.S. Autry), whlevine@uark.edu (W.H. Levine).

0378-2166/$ -- see front matter . Published by Elsevier B.V.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.06.014
[(Fig._1)TD$IG] K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485 1475

A x
Jones(x)
y
¬ Porsche(y)
x owns y

B xz
Jones(x)
German sports cars (z)
x likes z
y
¬ Porsche(y)
x owns y
Fig. 1. DRT-derived representation (adapted from Kamp and Reyle, 1993) of (A) Jones does not own a Porsche and (B) Jones likes German
sports cars. He does not own a Porsche. In these representations, the letters x, y, and z denote entities that are present in the discourse
representation. The entities they represent are listed next to each letter. The relations between entities are denoted by the verbs. The negation
operator (i.e., :) is placed next to a substructure that contains the negated predicate.

discourse world, should be mentally represented at a lower level of activation than an entity that is present. To test this,
Kaup asked subjects to decide whether the word table1 was in a sentence after they read a sentence like (2).

(2) Sarah is building a chair but not a table.

Response times were slower when the word had been negated compared to a control condition in which it was not
negated, lending some psychological plausibility to the substructure posited by DRT (see also MacDonald and Just,
1989). Other results (e.g., Autry and Levine, submitted for publication; Giora et al., 2007; Kaup, 2001; Kaup and Zwaan,
2003; Levine and Hagaman, 2008; Shuval and Hemforth, 2008) suggest a more-complex psychological theory of
representation of negation is needed, but for at least the representation of a simple sentence with a negated predicate in
which the absence of an entity is asserted, DRT provides an excellent starting point.
For its truth value to be determinate, sentence (2) semantically presupposes the existence of someone named Sarah (cf.
Levinson, 1983, especially Ch. 4; Strawson, 1950). If there is no one named Sarah, then there is no way to decide whether the
sentence is true. In addition, the truth of the sentence rests on whether Sarah is in the act of building, although this is not
presupposed; instead, it is new information predicated of Sarah. Furthermore, if Sarah is in the act of building, the truth of the
sentence rests on whether she is building a chair. However, when the negated noun-phrase (NP) not a table is encountered,
the sentence may be true on a number of different conditions, so long as there is no table being built; that is, there is no
semantic commitment to the existence of the table. In fact, the presence of this negated noun phrase raises an issue with
respect to what the sentence means. In a sense, the sentence is underinformative (cf. Grice, 1975), because, at least for this
sentence in isolation, there is no reason to mention the table. Whereas it is informative to provide a negation in a predicate that
has an opposite (e.g., The king of France is not bald, which implies that the king has hair; see Mayo et al., 2004, for results
pertinent to the representational implications of so-called bipolar negation), it is pragmatically odd to provide a negation in a
predicate in a sentence like (2) that does not have an opposite unless the discourse context has established a proposition (i.
e., a pragmatic presupposition; cf. Stalnaker, 1973) that can be denied, such as Sarah had planned to make a table. If no such
presupposition has been established, then the use of negation may be considered unlicensed and the processing of the
sentence should proceed differently than if a presupposition had been available to license the use of negation.
Evidence that such a presupposition is needed when encountering this kind of decontextualized negation comes from
Moxey and colleagues (e.g., Moxey and Sanford, 1986; Moxey, 2006). Moxey and Sanford provided subjects with
sentences that included negative quantifiers (cf. Klima, 1964) and a pronoun prompt, as in (3),

(3) Not many football fans went to the game. They . . .

1
Kaup's materials were in German, and the example presented here is simplified for exposition.
1476 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485

and asked them to provide a continuation. Critical to the argument here is that subjects had a tendency to provide reasons
why there were not more football fans at the game; that is, they provided a proposition to be denied by the negative
operator. Levine and Hagaman (2008) labeled this tendency to generate presupposed information in the face of
unmotivated negation the pragmatic inference hypothesis (see also Tian et al., 2010). Levine and Hagaman examined
activation levels of negated concepts in materials similar to those used by Kaup (2001) and MacDonald and Just (1989)
(see (2) above). Contrary to the results obtained by Kaup and by MacDonald and Just, Levine and Hagaman found
evidence that negated concepts are not suppressed in the discourse representation. They presented subjects with
sentences containing a target noun and a negated distractor from the same taxonomic category (4a) or a negated control
from a different taxonomic category (4b).

(4a) Justin bought a mango but not an apple.

(4b) Justin bought a mango but not any water.
(5) He ate the fruit.

This was followed by a sentence containing an anaphor referring to the non-negated noun (5). Subjects took longer to
read (5) in the distractor condition (i.e., after 4a), where the negated object was from the same taxonomic category, and
therefore a possible referent of fruit, than in the control condition (i.e., after 4b) when the negated object was from a
different category and therefore not a possible referent of fruit. This suggests that, despite being negated, the distractor
was considered during anaphor resolution, which argues against a simple suppressive function of negation (see also
Colston, 1999; Giora et al., 2005a,b, 2007; Shuval and Hemforth, 2008).
The results of these studies appear incompatible, but Autry and Levine (submitted for publication) argued that these
findings can be reconciled as follows: After reading a decontextualized sentence with a negated NP, a comprehender
focuses initially on what is asserted by the sentence, and with additional processing time attempts to fit the negation into
what is understood about the discourse, a sequence of operations labeled the New-Given strategy (cf. Haviland and
Clark's, 1974, Given-New strategy; see also Hornby, 1974). Thus, after reading a sentence like (1) in isolation, a
comprehender will be focused on creating a representation that includes a person named Jones and the fact that this
person does not own a Porsche; the representation will be analogous to that in Fig. 1A. Subsequently, it will be modified to
include additional information about what is presupposed; this modified representation takes time to construct, requiring a
pragmatic inference. By contrast, if a sentence like (1) is encountered in a context that licenses the mention of the negated
NP (e.g., Jones likes expensive German sports cars.), a comprehender will likely have to do less work to infer why the
negation is present. In essence, the representation that the comprehender must use to infer the presupposition to be
denied will be analogous to that in Fig. 1B. Given this richer representation, it should be much easier to infer a reason why
Jones does not own a Porsche, relative to the impoverished representation in Fig. 1A. The prior mention of Jones's
interest in German sports cars makes mentioning the Porsche easier to process, and should also provide the
comprehender greater access to information about German sports cars and Porsches, which in turn should make
generating an inference about why Jones does not own a Porsche (e.g., Jones must not be rich) somewhat easier.
Despite that the negation is still underinformative, it is less underinformative in the richer context.
The importance of licensing context in the processing of negation was demonstrated by Glenberg et al. (1999), who
presented subjects with short passages that introduced a choice about an attribute (e.g., color, material) of an object (6a
and 6b).

(6a) She wasn’t sure if a darkly colored couch would look the best or a lighter color.
(6b) She wasn’t sure what kind of material she wanted the couch to be made of.
(7) The couch wasn’t black.

This was followed by the target sentence (7) that always resolved the choice of the attribute regardless of which context
it followed. Reading times on the target sentence were shorter when the attribute in the context matched the attribute in the
target sentence than when they mismatched, suggesting that additional processing occurred when a relevant
presupposition was unavailable. Similar results were obtained by Lüdtke and Kaup (2006), who presented subjects with
passages that introduced the presence of a particular attribute (e.g., warm; 8a) or not (8b).

(8a) Danielle wondered whether the water would be warm.

(8b) Danielle wondered what the water would be like.
(9) The water was not warm.

This was followed by the target sentence (9) that negated the attribute in sentence (8a). Reading times on the target
sentence were significantly longer when the attribute was not introduced in the preceding context than when it was, again
 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485 1477

Table 1
Sample contexts and target sentences from Experiments 1a and 1b.

Non-licensing context
Justin got up early to exercise. He jogged and stopped at the store afterward.
Experiment 1a Target sentences
AND: Justin bought a mango and an apple.
NOT: Justin bought a mango but not an apple.
Experiment 1b Target sentences
AND: Justin bought an apple and a mango.
NOT: Justin bought an apple but not a mango.

suggesting that additional processing was required to process negation when there was no relevant presupposition to be
denied.
These context studies (i.e., Glenberg et al., 1999; Lüdtke and Kaup, 2006; see also Nieuwland and Kuperberg, 2008)
examined the processing of the negated sentence, but not the activation level of the negated concept itself. Therefore, the
purpose of the present studies was to test whether the different activation levels found for negated concepts can be
explained by whether the negation is licensed or unlicensed, as well as when the mental representation is assessed. In
Experiments 1a and 1b, subjects read short passages ending with a target sentence that either did or did not contain
negation (see Table 1). The target sentence was preceded by two context sentences which, importantly, did not license
the use of negation in the final sentence. After reading each passage, subjects wrote a single-sentence continuation of the
passage. Despite that continuation-writing is an offline measure, we chose it for two reasons. First, we are primarily
interested in the longer-term representation of negated concepts, not the moment-by-moment changes in activation that
occur (see Autry and Levine, submitted for publication; Hasson and Glucksberg, 2006). Second, we hypothesize that the
processing of negation, especially when it is not licensed by prior context, takes time to run to completion, and the
continuation-writing measure is delayed enough to ensure that these processes are complete by the time the subject is
writing. Thus, we believe that the prevalence in subjects’ continuations of mentions of the nouns from the target sentences
is likely a function of a number of factors, including, but not limited to: how active the associated concepts are in their
mental representations, as well as the demands of the continuation-writing task (e.g., coherence). However, a high
activation level does not necessitate the mention of the concept in all cases. For example, when the concept is such an
integral part of the discourse that it would be redundant to (re)mention it directly, there is probably at least some disconnect
between activation and mention. It is also possible that when multiple concepts are highly active, a single concept could be
selected as the focus of a sentence. In a case like this, it is not even clear that the mentioned concept would be the one
with the highest activation level. A concept could be more active than another but less relevant to the unfolding discourse,
as in the case of a topic shift, and therefore be excluded. With these limitations in mind, we take the frequency of mention
of different nouns as at least an ordinal indicator of how active the associated concept is. This assumption is fairly
standard, as many language researchers investigating a variety of domains have used a similar continuation task to infer
the prominence or strength of a mental representation (e.g., Lea et al., 2002; Sanford and Lockhart, 1990; Stevenson
et al., 1994).
Based on the pragmatic inference hypothesis (Levine and Hagaman, 2008), it was predicted that Noun1 (i.e., the first
direct object) would be written about equally often in the NOT and AND conditions, since it is non-negated in both, and that
Noun2 (i.e., the second direct object) would be written about more often in the NOT condition, when it is negated, than in
the baseline AND condition, when it is non-negated. In the sample passage given in Table 1, there is no reason to expect
Justin to buy an apple, so it appears infelicitous for the sentence to read but not an apple. Because there is no apparent
reason for the negation to have been included, the reader must do some additional processing to understand why it was
included. This processing involving the negated concept should then increase its activation and make it more likely to be a
topic of subjects’ continuations.

2. Experiments 1a and 1b

2.1. Method

2.1.1. Subjects
In Experiment 1a, 40 subjects with a mean age of 19.7 years (range 18--29 years) participated, and in Experiment 1b,
38 subjects with a mean age of 19.2 years (range 18--24 years) participated. All subjects participated in exchange for
partial fulfillment of a general psychology course requirement, and all subjects reported that they were native speakers of
English.
1478 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485

2.1.2. Materials, design, and procedure

Sixteen experimental passages were created (see Table 1 for a sample passage). Each passage consisted of a non-
licensing context and a subsequent target sentence. The non-licensing context was two sentences long and provided
some background for the target sentence, although there was no obvious relation between the context and specific items
in the target sentence. The target sentence contained two direct objects from the same taxonomic category, one of which
was a high-frequency exemplar (e.g., apple) and the other was a low-frequency exemplar (e.g., mango); typicality has
been shown to play a role in the activation level of negated entities (Levine and Hagaman, 2008). The target sentence
appeared in one of two conditions. In the AND condition, neither direct object was negated, and in the NOT condition, the
second direct object was negated. In Experiment 1a, the order of the two direct objects was such that the lower-frequency
exemplar appeared first, and this was reversed in Experiment 1b. All target sentences appear in Appendix A.
In addition to the 16 experimental passages, there were 16 filler passages that were designed to obscure the
experimental manipulation. The fillers were of the same length, but the target sentence either negated the first of the two
direct objects and not the second or had only a single non-negated direct object.
Four lists of experimental items were created for Experiment 1a and for Experiment 1b so that each experimental
passage appeared in the AND and NOT conditions half the time, and the order of appearance of the items was reversed in
two lists. The experimental passages were alternated with the fillers and in each list the passages appeared in a fixed
order. Thus, there was one within-subject factor of interest (i.e., AND vs. NOT) and two between-subject factors: the order
of the nouns in the direct object, and the order of the list.
Subjects who volunteered to participate received a link to SurveyMonkey, an internet-based survey tool
(SurveyMonkey.com, LLC, Palo Alto, CA), where they completed the questionnaire. After providing demographic
information, subjects were randomly assigned to one of the four passage lists. Subjects were instructed to read each
passage and to write a single sentence that continued, but that did not necessarily complete, the passage. Subjects then
completed 32 trials (16 fillers) in which the entire three-sentence passage was presented and remained on the screen
while the subjects wrote their continuation. Each passage was presented on a separate screen.

2.1.3. Coding continuations

The continuation sentences were initially categorized independently by two research assistants who were blind to
the conditions of the sentences. Each continuation was categorized as making reference to Noun1, Noun2, or Other;
ambiguous sentences were re-categorized by the first author, who had access to the sentence conditions. The
continuations were categorized as referencing Noun1 or Noun2 if there was repeated NP reference (e.g., The apple
was a healthy choice; Mangos were finally in season), categorical reference (e.g., The fruit helped quench his thirst),
or pronominal reference (e.g., It tasted delicious). If a continuation contained reference to both Noun1 and Noun2
(e.g., He ate the apple and saved the mango for later), it was categorized as having both a Noun1 and a Noun2
reference. Continuations were categorized as Other if they did not refer to either noun. In Experiment 1a, interrater
reliability was 94%, and in Experiment 1b, interrater reliability was 97%; all disagreements were resolved by the first
author.

2.2. Results

2.2.1. Experiment 1a results

Because subjects and items are both random-effects variables, the data were analyzed twice, once with subjects
treated as a random-effects variable (averaging over items), for which F1 and t1 are reported, and once with items treated
as a random-effects variable (averaging over subjects), for which F2 and t2 are reported. An alpha level of .05 was adopted
for all tests of significance. Where effect-size measures are reported, they are based on the subjects analysis.
Noun2 was of primary interest since it was presented both negated and non-negated, but references to Noun1, which
was always non-negated, were also analyzed. In general, there were many more references to both direct-object nouns in
the NOT than in the baseline AND condition (see Fig. 2), but the magnitude of this effect did not differ substantially for the
two nouns. There were also approximately equal numbers of references to Noun1 and Noun2. To verify these results, the
proportion of references to each noun were analyzed with a 2 (Sentence type: AND vs. NOT)  2 (Noun1 vs. Noun2)
repeated-measures ANOVA, which revealed a significant main effect for sentence type with subjects writing about the
nouns more often in the NOT condition (M = .42, SD = .15) than in the AND condition (M = .15, SD = .15), F1(1, 39)
= 86.36, p < .001, h2p ¼ :69, F2(1, 15) = 53.19, p < .001. The main effect of noun was non-significant, F1(1, 39) = 1.25,
p = .27, F2(1, 15) = 0.38, p = .55, as was the interaction between sentence type and noun, F1(1, 39) = 1.81, p = .19, F2(1,
15) = 0.97, p = .34.
Planned paired-samples t-tests revealed that subjects wrote more about Noun2 more often in the NOT condition (i.e.,
when it was negated) (M = .39, SD = .20) than in the AND condition (i.e., when it was non-negated) (M = .15, SD = .16),
[(Fig._2)TD$IG] K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485 1479

Fig. 2. Results of Experiments 1a and 1b: proportion of references to each noun in the target sentence as a function of whether the target sentence
appeared in the AND or NOT condition. Error bars represent 1 SE.

t1(39) = 6.92, p < .001, d = 1.33, t2(15) = 7.43, p < .001. However, subjects also wrote about Noun1 more often in the
NOT condition (M = .45, SD = .21) than in the AND condition (M = .15, SD = .14), t1(39) = 7.44, p < .001, d = 1.68, t2(15)
= 4.18, p = .001.

2.2.2. Experiment 1b results

The results of Experiment 1b were similar to those of Experiment 1a, with many more references to both direct-object
nouns in the NOT than in the AND condition (see Fig. 2). Again, there were approximately equal numbers of references to
Noun1 and Noun2. A 2 (Sentence type: AND vs. NOT)  2 (Noun1 vs. Noun2) repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a
significant main effect for sentence type with subjects writing about the nouns more often in the NOT condition (M = .47,
SD = .15) than in the AND condition (M = .18, SD = .19), F1(1, 35) = 80.54, p < .001, h2p ¼ :70, F2(1, 15) = 136.97,
p < .001. The main effect of noun and interaction between sentence type and noun were both non-significant (Fs < 1).
Planned paired-samples t-tests revealed that subjects wrote about Noun2 more often in the NOT condition (i.e., when it
was negated) (M = .46, SD = .27) than in the AND condition (i.e., when it was non-negated) (M = .20, SD = .17), t1(35)
= 5.71, p < .001, d = 1.15, t2(15) = 5.24, p < .001. However, subjects also wrote about Noun1 more often in the NOT
condition (M = .48, SD = .22) than in the AND condition (M = .17, SD = .21), t1(35) = 7.02, p < .001, d = 1.36, t2(15)
= 7.05, p < .001.
The effect of typicality was assessed by comparing the results of Experiments 1a and 1b. A 2 (Experiment: 1a [high-
typicality exemplar negated] vs. 1b [low-typicality exemplar negated])  2 (Sentence type: AND vs. NOT)  2 (Noun1 vs.
Noun2) mixed-factors ANOVA did not reveal a significant interaction of experiment, sentence type, and noun (Fs < 1).
The lack of interaction and the similar pattern of results across Experiments 1a and 1b suggests that typicality was not
strongly influencing the results.

2.3. Discussion

The higher proportion of references to Noun2 in the NOT condition relative to the baseline AND condition suggests that
the negation increased the activation level of the concept. Noun2 was more salient when it was negated and thus
more likely to be a topic for subjects’ continuations than when it was non-negated. This result supports the hypothesis that
1480 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485

Table 2
Sample context and target sentences from Experiment 2.

Licensing context
Justin regularly ate an apple after his morning exercise. He jogged and stopped at a store afterward.
Target sentences
AND: Justin bought a mango and an apple.
NOT: Justin bought a mango but not an apple.

non-licensed negation can increase the activation level of negated concepts through a pragmatic inference process.
Presumably, the mention of not an apple when no apple has been previously mentioned leads a comprehender to try to
infer why the apple was mentioned at all (Grice, 1975). This extra attention in turn leads to the concept apple becoming
more active, with the result being that it showed up more often in the continuations (cf. Giora et al., 2005a,b).
The higher proportion of references to Noun1 in the NOT condition relative to the AND condition was not hypothesized
because Noun1 was always non-negated and therefore did not differ between conditions. Although unexpected, the
observed difference may have been caused by the contrast between Noun1 and Noun2 in the NOT condition. In the AND
condition, there is no contrast between the two concepts because they are both non-negated, but in the NOT condition,
the negation of Noun2 creates an inherent contrast between the two concepts (i.e., one concept is selected and the other
is not). Research has shown that when one member of a contrast set is mentioned, the other member of the contrast set is
activated as well (Wolter et al., 2011). Therefore, when the negation increases the activation of Noun2 as hypothesized, it
may also be increasing the activation of the contrasted Noun1, causing a similar increase in references relative to the AND
condition.

3. Experiment 2

The results from Experiments 1a and 1b suggest that negating a concept might actually make it more active in a
reader's mental representation, contrary to findings from probe-word tasks (Autry and Levine, submitted for publication;
Kaup, 2001; MacDonald and Just, 1989). To test whether this effect is the result of the negation being non-licensed, the
materials from Experiment 1a were revised so that in Experiment 2 the context licensed the negation (see Table 2). The
pragmatic inference hypothesis (see also Givón, 1978) states that negation of an existing concept should be easier than
when the same negation appears in isolation. This relative ease of processing negation in context has been demonstrated
several times (Glenberg et al., 1999; Lüdtke and Kaup, 2006; Wason, 1965). As a result of this relative ease, less attention
will accrue to the negated concept. Thus, it was predicted that, following the licensing context, the proportion of references
to Noun2 would be at a similar level in both the AND and NOT conditions. Furthermore, because the licensing is
accomplished through repeated mention of Noun2, it is expected that there should be an overall increase in the proportion
of references to Noun2 relative to Experiment 1. This prediction is based on the literature demonstrating that repetition of a
concept increases its activation in a large number of tasks (e.g., Forster and Davis, 1984).

3.1. Method

3.1.1. Subjects
There were 43 subjects with a mean age of 36.9 years (range 18--69 years). They were recruited and paid 5¢ for their
participation via Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing marketplace that enables online data collection. All
were native speakers of English.

3.1.2. Materials and procedure

Subjects were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. They were provided a link to a questionnaire hosted by
Qualtrics, an internet-based survey tool (Qualtrics Labs, Provo, UT). The target sentences were identical to Experiment
1a. The context sentences, however, were revised so that they licensed the use of negation in the target sentence (see
Table 2). To do this, each licensing context explicitly mentioned Noun2, creating an explicit mention of the entity for the
negation in the target sentence to deny. In particular, the context was written so that there was an expectation that the
noun to be negated in the NOT condition was expected to be obtained, eaten, interacted with, etc. in the last sentence.

3.1.3. Data preparation

The continuation sentences were coded in the same way as in Experiments 1a and 1b. Interrater reliability was 90%,
and all disagreements were resolved by the first author.
[(Fig._3)TD$IG] K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485 1481

Fig. 3. Results of Experiment 2: proportion of references to each noun in the target sentence as a function of whether the target sentence
appeared in the AND or NOT condition. Error bars represent 1 SE.

3.2. Results

A 2 (Sentence type)  2 (Noun) repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect for sentence type in the
subject analysis and a nearly significant effect in the item analysis, with subjects writing about both nouns more often in the
NOT condition (M = .40, SD = .14) than in the AND condition (M = .32, SD = .16), F1(1, 42) = 7.74, p < .01, h2p ¼ :16, F2(1,
15) = 3.76, p = .071. There was also a significant main effect for the noun, with subjects writing about Noun2 (M = .41,
SD = .18) more often than Noun1 (M = .31, SD = .12), F1(1, 42) = 15.51, p < .001, h2p ¼ :27, F2(1, 15) = 4.54, p = .05.
These main effects are qualified by a nearly significant interaction between sentence type and noun in the subject
analysis, F1(1, 42) = 3.54, p = .068, h2p ¼ :08 (see Fig. 3); however, this effect was non-significant in the item analysis,
F2(1, 15) = 2.34, p = .147. Planned paired-samples t-tests revealed that subjects wrote about Noun1 more often in the
NOT condition (M = .37, SD = .17) than in the AND condition (M = .24, SD = .19), t1(42) = 3.09, p < .01, d = 0.72, t2(15)
= 2.71, p < .05. However, critically, subjects wrote about Noun2 about equally often in the NOT (M = .42, SD = .24) and
AND conditions (M = .40, SD = .20), t1(42) = 0.32, p = .75, t2(15) = 0.00, p = 1.

3.3. Discussion

Treating the proportion of continuations in the AND condition as an indicator of baseline activation when an entity has
been previously introduced, the results from Experiment 2 demonstrated that in a licensing context, Noun2 was equally
active when negated and non-negated. In contrast with Experiments 1a and 1b in which unlicensed negation resulted in a
higher activation level for Noun2 when it was negated compared to when it was non-negated, the results of Experiment 2
suggest that licensed negation draws no special attention to a negated entity. The results are therefore consistent with the
hypothesis that licensing negation via prior mention of the concept to be negated leads to easier processing of the
negation (e.g., Lüdtke and Kaup, 2006), and this easier processing in turn prevents additional attention from accruing on
the negated concept.
In Experiment 2, the repetition of the critical concept across the licensing context and the target sentence resulted in a
higher proportion of references to Noun2 in the AND (i.e., non-negated) condition (about .40) compared to Experiments 1a
and 1b (about .18). However, the proportion of references to Noun2 in the NOT (i.e., negated) condition was essentially
unchanged, from .43 in Experiments 1a and 1b to .42 in Experiment 2. The repetition effect should logically affect non-
negated and negated concepts equally; therefore, the absence of a repetition effect from Experiments 1a and 1b to
Experiment 2 for Noun2 in the NOT condition suggests an opposing mechanism. Recall that we attributed the higher
proportion of references to Noun2 in Experiments 1a and 1b when it was negated compared to when it was non-negated to
the additional presuppositional processing required to comprehend the unlicensed negation, and the consequent
additional attention that accrues on the negated concept. From this point of view, in the licensing contexts in Experiment 2,
less processing is required to comprehend the negation in the NOT condition, with the consequence being that there is
little or no increase the activation of Noun2, consistent with the results of Experiment 2. Therefore, we propose that the
reason that the proportion of references to Noun2 in the NOT condition does not differ across experiments is because the
presuppositional processing, which was the cause of the increased activation in Experiments 1a and 1b, has been
replaced in Experiment 2 by increased activation resulting from the repetition. If both processes were present in
Experiment 2, the proportion of references to Noun2 in the NOT condition would have been substantially higher than in
Experiments 1a and 1b. We also think that the likelihood that a ceiling effect on the proportion of references is masking
such an effect is low, given that we observed a proportion of references nearly as high as .5 in Experiment 1b (see Fig. 2).
1482 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485

The current results also provide additional support for the explanation that the contrast created in the NOT condition
caused an increase in activation of the non-negated Noun1. As in Experiments 1a and 1b, Noun1 had a higher proportion
of reference in the NOT condition than in the AND condition, despite being non-negated in both cases. Although these
experiments do not test the contrast hypothesis directly, they do provide some evidence that the increased activation of
Noun1 is not due to licensing or the lack thereof.

4. General discussion

In three experiments, subjects were presented with short passages that ended with a target sentence that contained (e.
g., Justin bought a mango but not an apple) or did not contain (e.g., Justin bought a mango and an apple) a negated entity.
The subjects were asked to write continuations for these passages. The passages were manipulated so that the negation
was either licensed by prior mention of the to-be-negated concept or not licensed. Continuations were scored to measure
how often Noun1 (e.g., mango) and Noun2 (e.g., apple) were referred to as a function of whether Noun2 was negated or
not.
Although Noun1 was always non-negated, it was referred to more often in the NOT condition than in the AND condition
across all three experiments. As previously discussed, this effect may be the result of the contrast implicit in the NOT
condition and made explicit by the word but. When one item in a contrastive set increases in activation, this activation also
spreads to the other item in the set (Wolter et al., 2011). Therefore, when Noun2 increases in activation, either through
additional processing required to comprehend non-licensed negation (Experiments 1a and 1b) or through repetition of the
concept (Experiment 2), the activation level of Noun1 also increases.
Of more theoretical interest were the proportion of continuations to Noun2 across conditions. In the first two
experiments, the context prior to the target sentence did not mention Noun2, making the negation unexpected and
uninformative (i.e., unlicensed). Under these conditions, subjects wrote much more frequently about Noun2 when it was
negated than when it was not negated. By contrast, in the last experiment, the context prior to the target sentence did
mention Noun2, making the negation easier to integrate into the discourse representation (Glenberg et al., 1999; Lüdtke
and Kaup, 2006; Nieuwland and Kuperberg, 2008; Wason, 1965). Under these conditions, subjects wrote about Noun2
about equally often when it was negated as when it was not negated.
One limitation of the present procedure is that negation was only manipulated for Noun2. There is evidence that the
accessibility of a negated concept is affected by its position in the sentence (Shuval, 2011), such that a negated concept in
the second position of a pair (e.g., a mango but not an apple) would be more active than the same concept in the first
position (e.g., not an apple but a mango). It is therefore possible that the position of the negation may have influenced the
activation level of the negated concepts. Although it is unlikely that this accounts for the entire negation effect, it remains
an empirical question whether the same negation effect would be found for negated concepts in the first position.
The results here are the first we know of in the psycholinguistics literature to show that a concept is more active or
salient in a mental representation when it is negated than when it is not. The only comparable finding we know of was
reported by Giora et al. (2007, Experiments 2 and 3). Giora et al. presented subjects with negative sentences2 like the
second one in (10).

(10) I live in a neighborhood of millionaires who like only their own kind. Nonetheless, on a Saturday night, I also invited to
the party at my place a woman who is not wealthy.

Critically, the first sentence provided a context that made the negated concept (i.e., wealth) relevant by mentioning
millionaires. Subjects responded to a probe word (e.g., rich) that was related to the negated concept (or an unrelated
probe word) either 100, 750, or 1000 ms after the offset of the second sentence. Responses to the probe word were faster
than to the control at the 750 ms delay, suggesting that despite that the assertion of the sentence is that the woman who
was invited was (relatively) poor, the negated concept was highly active in the subjects’ mental representation. This
difference did not emerge at the other two time points, further suggesting that there is an ebb and flow to the activation of
negated information. Giora et al. argued that because the concept of wealth was relevant to the prior context, the
importance of maintaining coherence across sentences led to the non-suppression of the negated concept. However,
although this is clear evidence of non-suppression of negated information, it does not show an increase in the salience or
activation of negated information, which is what we have observed in the case of unlicensed negation in Experiments 1a
and 1b. We must temper our conclusions slightly because probe-word tasks like that used by Giora et al. (see also Autry
and Levine, submitted for publication; Kaup, 2001; Kaup and Zwaan, 2003; MacDonald and Just, 1989) are often

2
These materials were in Hebrew, but Giora et al. (2007) presented their translations in English in their report.
 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485 1483

considered the gold standard for measuring the activation level of concepts. However, as noted in the introduction, many
researchers have argued that the prevalence with which a concept is mentioned in a written continuation is a function of at
least the concept's activation (Lea et al., 2002; Sanford and Lockhart, 1990; Stevenson et al., 1994).
Outside of the psycholinguistics and linguistics literature, the finding that unlicensed negation draws attention to what is
negated is unlikely to come as a surprise. A substantial literature exists on what have been labeled ironic processes (e.g.,
Wegner and Erber, 1992; Wegner et al., 1987). In the seminal research in this literature, Wegner et al. asked their subjects
to ‘‘try not to think of a white bear’’ (p. 6). Using a variety of measures, they found that subjects were not only unable to
suppress thoughts of a white bear, but following the nominal suppression period they experienced an ‘‘ironic’’ increase in
thoughts about a white bear. Wegner and Erber found that, during a word-association task under time pressure, thought-
suppression instructions (e.g., subjects were told not to think about the word house) led to increased mentions of the to-
be-suppressed target word. Even from a psycholinguistic point-of-view, our findings may be viewed as unsurprising. If one
mentions -- out of context -- that one did not buy an apple, this is presumably done either because of an existing prior
expectation that an apple would be purchased or because of a desire to draw attention to one's lack of an apple, and
perhaps the reasons for it. In particular, Du Bois (1998, 2001, as cited in Giora, 2007) has argued that negated concepts
resonate with concepts in a discourse just as non-negated concepts do. Of particular importance is Du Bois's notion of
forward resonance, which refers to the notion that the constituents in a current utterance are chosen by the speaker (or
writer) keeping in mind what might be spoken later. Thus, choosing to utter a unlicensed negation may serve as a cue that
the negated entity will be referred to again. Further, it may be argued that using a negation ironically (e.g., He is not
exceptionally bright) rather than using a similar nonironic affirmative statement (e.g., He is stupid) may be done precisely
to bring attention to the negated concept, at least momentarily (cf. Giora et al., 2005a,b).
From both a psychological as well as a formal semantic point of view, findings like the ones we observed in these
experiments are relatively easy to explain. According to the pragmatic inference hypothesis (Levine and Hagaman, 2008),
negated concepts are less difficult to process when they have been previously mentioned because the need to infer a
presupposition to be canceled or denied is made easier or removed entirely. That is, given the sentence, Jones does not own
a Porsche, we contend that the time course of the processing of an isolated negation like this starts with what is asserted by
the sentence, and then after that continues with how the sentence fits into the larger context, to the extent a context exists.
Thus, initially, the comprehender's effort is focused on constructing a bare representation of the assertion(s) in the sentence,
with the result being something like the representation in Fig. 1A. This representation is underinformative, and leaves the
comprehender with additional work to do to try to understand what the intended meaning of the sentence is. To try to preserve
the principle of cooperative communication (Grice, 1975) or of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), the comprehender
must infer some reason why the Porsche is mentioned (Levine and Hagaman, 2008). This effortful processing is likely a
cause of not only additional attention accruing to the negated entity, as seen in Experiments 1a and 1b, but also the cause of
slowed processing of negation when it is underinformative (e.g., Glenberg et al., 1999). A probe-word task that is presented
immediately at the end of the sentence will show evidence that the negated concept is suppressed or at a low level of
activation (Autry and Levine, submitted for publication; Kaup, 2001; MacDonald and Just, 1989), consistent with the
hypothesis that at this point in processing the comprehender is focused on what is asserted by the sentence (i.e., there is no
Porsche). A later probe-word task shows that this suppression effect is short-lived (Autry and Levine, submitted for
publication), consistent with the hypothesis that at a later point in time the comprehender is focused on trying to preserve the
sentence's informativeness. This later focusing on the intended meaning of the sentence makes the negated concept more
active, leaving it readily available for anaphoric reference (Cook et al., 2005; Shuval and Hemforth, 2008).
By contrast, when a sentence like Jones does not own a Porsche is encountered in a context that mentions a Porsche
directly or names a category that a Porsche belongs to, such as Jones like German sports cars, the processing of the
negation is easier. This is likely in part due to the exact or conceptual repetition of a concept (e.g., Forster and Davis, 1984)
but also to the relative ease of trying to infer the intended meaning of the sentence. Trying to infer the reason for the
negation to have been mentioned at all should be made easier because a topic of the discourse is clearly related to the
negated concept; integration of information across the sentences is easier in the rich representation depicted in Fig. 1B.
This ease of processing prevents additional attention from accruing to the negated concept, as seen in Experiment 2. It
further explains why processing negation in supportive contexts is easier (Glenberg et al., 1999; Lüdtke and Kaup, 2006;
Nieuwland and Kuperberg, 2008; Wason, 1965).
The presuppositional inferences that we have argued that our subjects made when, as in Experiments 1a and 1b, there
was no prior mention of the negated concept, are not semantic presuppositions. They are instead pragmatic
presuppositions, in Stalnaker's (1973, 2002) sense of the term. As Stalnaker argues, ‘‘to presuppose something is take it
for granted, or at least act as if one takes it for granted, as background information -- as common ground among the
participants in the conversation’’ (2002, p. 701, emphasis in the original). This means that these presuppositions are about
the (presumed) producer of the sentence and the experimental subject and their shared knowledge, rather than about the
truth value of the sentence. The producer of the sentence is assumed to be attempting to introduce new, relevant
information to the sentence recipient (cf. Sperber and Wilson, 1995). When the new information appears to be unrelated to
1484 K.S. Autry, W.H. Levine / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1474--1485

the prior context (i.e., irrelevant), as in the case of negation in isolation, the recipient must make inferences to preserve the
relevance of the new information and to find a way to integrate it with the mental representation of the discourse that is
being built. We argue that these pragmatic efforts are what led to the behavioral effects reflected in the different pattern of
results across Experiments 1a and 1b relative to Experiment 2. Although our methodology does not allow us to draw
strong conclusions about the moment-by-moment changes in activation of negated concepts that must occur as a function
of pragmatic processing (e.g., Autry and Levine, submitted for publication; Giora et al., 2007; Hasson and Glucksberg,
2006), we believe that it does allow us to draw strong conclusions about the ultimate output of the pragmatic processes.

4.1. Conclusion

The findings reported in this paper provide direct evidence that when negated concepts are presented in isolation or
unsupportive context, they are represented at a higher level of activation than comparable non-negated concepts. When
the same negated concepts are presented in a context that licenses the negation by prior mention, the level of activation of
the negated concepts is approximately the same as comparable non-negated concepts. We hypothesize that this is
because processing negation in supportive contexts requires less effort to infer why the negation was mentioned; that is, it
is more informative. This hypothesis provides a way to reconcile findings that negation leads to lower levels of activation in
some circumstances (Autry and Levine, submitted for publication; Kaup, 2001; MacDonald and Just, 1989) but not in
others (Autry and Levine, submitted for publication; Giora et al., 2005a,b). More research is needed to delineate a full list of
factors that lead to negation being easier or harder to process, and to negated concepts being represented at different
levels of activation, but this research will be informative to the larger goal of understanding how comprehenders integrate
new and given information into the semantic representation of discourse.

Acknowledgements

Support for this research was provided by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0617419 to WHL.
We thank Natalie Brown, Chandra Chappell, Sydney Clegg, Willy Curry, and James Gerhart for their assistance with
stimulus preparation and data-coding.

Appendix A. Target sentences used in all experiments

After dinner, Wanda served a tart (and/but not) cake.

Bob decided to include a penguin (and/but not) a cardinal.
Courtney bought a scarf (and/but not) pants.
Daniel bought turquoise (and/but not) purple paint.
Gregory planted a willow (and/but not) an oak.
Hannah sent her boyfriend orchids (and/but not) tulips.
Justin bought a mango (and/but not) an apple.
Kaitlyn got a table (and/but not) a chair.
Luis saw a moth (and/but not) a mosquito.
Megan bought some loafers (and/but not) sandals.
Nathan bought her a choker (and/but not) a ring.
Patrick bought some veal (and/but not) chicken.
Rachel got a canary (and/but not) a dog.
Tony picked archaeology (and/but not) business.
Vincent bought a shovel (and/but not) a screwdriver.
While shopping, he bought some cabbage (and/but not) carrots.

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