INTRODUCTION: This study examines how negation is processed in a nonverbal context (e.g., when assessing ▲ ≠ ▲) by speakers of a truth-based system like Mandarin and a polarity-based system like English. In a truth-based system, negation may take longer to process because it is typically attached to the negation as a whole (it is not true that triangle does not equal triangle), whereas in polarity-based systems, negation is processed relatively faster because it is attached to just the equation symbol (triangle does not equal triangle), which is processed relatively faster. Our hypothesis was that negation processing routines previously observed for verbal contexts, namely that speakers of Mandarin get slowed down more when processing negative stimuli than positive stimuli compared to speakers of English, also extend to contexts when language use is not obligatory. METHODS: To test this, we asked participants to agree/disagree with equations comprising simple shapes and positive '=' or negative '≠' equation symbols. English speakers showed a response-time advantage over Mandarin speakers in negation conditions. In a separate experiment, we also tested the contribution of equation symbols '≠'/'=' to the cognitive demands by asking participants to judge shape sameness in symbol-free trials, such as ▲ ■. This comparison allowed us to test whether crosslinguistic differences arise not because of shape congruence judgement but arguably due to negation attachment. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The effect of the '≠' symbol on shape congruence was language-specific, speeding up English speakers but slowing down Mandarin speakers when the two shapes differed. These findings suggest language-specific processing of negation in negative equations, interpreted as novel support for linguistic relativity.

College of Foreign Languages University of Shanghai for Science and Technology Shanghai China

Experimental Research on Central European Languages Lab Charles University Prague Czechia

School of Cultures Languages and Linguistics The University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Akiyama M. M. (1979). Yes–no answering systems in young children. Cogn. Psychol. 11, 485–504. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(79)90022-7 DOI

Akiyama M. M. (1985). Denials in young children from a cross-linguistic perspective. Child Dev. 56, 95–102. doi: 10.2307/1130177 DOI

Akiyama M. M. (1992). Cross-linguistic contrasts of verification and answering among children. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 21, 67–85. doi: 10.1007/BF01067988, PMID: PubMed DOI

Athanasopoulos P., Bylund E. (2013). Does grammatical aspect affect motion event cognition? A cross-linguistic comparison of English and Swedish speakers. Cogn. Sci. 37, 286–309. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12006, PMID: PubMed DOI

Baayen R. H., Davidson D. J., Bates D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. J. Mem. Lang. 59, 390–412. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005 DOI

Barr D. J., Levy R., Scheepers C., Tily H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. J. Mem. Lang. 68, 255–278. PubMed PMC

Barsalou L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behav. Brain Sci. 22, 577–660. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X99532147 PubMed DOI

Beltrán D., Muñetón-Ayala M., de Vega M. (2018). Sentential negation modulates inhibition in a stop-signal task. Evidence from behavioral and ERP data. Neuropsychologia 112, 10–18. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.03.004, PMID: PubMed DOI

Brown P., Levinson S. C. (1993). Linguistic and nonlinguistic coding of spatial arrays: Explorations in Mayan cognition. Working Paper 24. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Carpenter P. A., Just M. A. (1975). Sentence comprehension: a psycholinguistic processing model of verification. Psychol. Rev. 82, 45–73. doi: 10.1037/h0076248 DOI

Casasanto D., Boroditsky L., Phillips W., Greene J., Goswami S., Bocanegra-Thiel S, et al. . (2004). How deep are effects of language on thought? Time estimation in speakers of English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish. In Forbus K., Gentner D., Regier T. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 26th annual conference of the cognitive science society, 575–580. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Choi S. (1991). Children’s answers to yes–no questions: a developmental study in English, French, and Korean. Dev. Psychol. 27, 407–420. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.27.3.407 DOI

Clark H. H., Chase W. G. (1972). On the process of comparing sentences against pictures. Cogn. Psychol. 3, 472–517. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(72)90019-9 DOI

Davidoff J., Davies I., Roberson D. (1999). Colour categories in a stone-age tribe. Nature 398, 203–204. doi: 10.1038/18335, PMID: PubMed DOI

de Vega M., Morera Y., León I., Beltrán D., Casado P., Martín-Loeches M. (2016). Sentential negation might share neurophysiological mechanisms with action inhibition. Evidence from frontal theta rhythm. J. Neurosci. 36, 6002–6010. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3736-15.2016, PMID: PubMed DOI PMC

Du P., Liu D., Zhang L., Hitchman G., Lin C. (2014). The processing of contradictory and non-contradictory negative sentences. J. Cogn. Psychol. 26, 461–472. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2014.903957 DOI

Dudschig C., Kaup B. (2018). How does “not left” become “right”? Electrophysiological evidence for a dynamic conflict-bound negation processing account. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44, 716–728. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000481, PMID: PubMed DOI

Fischler I., Bloom P. A., Childers D. G., Roucos S. E., Perry N. W., Jr. (1983). Brain potentials related to stages of sentence verification. Psychophysiology 20, 400–409. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1983.tb00920.x PubMed DOI

Fuhrman O., McCormick K., Chen E., Jiang H., Shu D., Mao S., et al. . (2011). How linguistic and cultural forces shape conceptions of time: English and mandarin time in 3D. Cogn. Sci. 35, 1305–1328. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01193.x, PMID: PubMed DOI

Giora R., Balaban N., Fein O., Alkabets I. (2004). “Negation as positivity in disguise,” in Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences. eds. Colston H. L., Katz A. (Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers; ), 233–258.

Gordon P. (2004). Numerical cognition without words: evidence from Amazonia. Science 306, 496–499. doi: 10.1126/science.1094492, PMID: PubMed DOI

Hasson U., Glucksberg S. (2006). Does understanding negation entail affirmation?: an examination of negated metaphors. J. Pragmat. 38, 1015–1032. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2005.12.005 DOI

Holmberg A. (2013). The syntax of answers to negative yes/no-questions in English and Swedish. Lingua 128, 31–50. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.018 DOI

Holmberg A. (2014). Answering yes/no-questions in English and other languages. EFL J. 5, 23–42.

Holmberg A. (2015). The syntax of yes and no. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Huang B., Liao X. (2007). Xiandai hanyu (Modern Mandarin). Beijing: Higher Education Press, 1–159).

Huddleston R., Pullum G. K. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Jones B. M. (1999). The Welsh answering system. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Kaup B., Lüdtke J., Zwaan R. A. (2006). Processing negated sentences with contradictory predicates: is a door that is not open mentally closed? J. Pragmat. 38, 1033–1050. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2005.09.012 DOI

Kaup B., Yaxley R. H., Madden C. J., Zwaan R. A., Lüdtke J. (2007). Experiential simulations of negated text information. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 60, 976–990. doi: 10.1080/17470210600823512, PMID: PubMed DOI

Levinson S. C. (1996). “Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslinguistic evidence” in Language and space. eds. Bloom P., Peterson M., Nadel L., Garrett M. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; ), 109–169.

Lu J. (2005). Xiandai hanyu yufa yanjiu jiaocheng (a study guide of modern Chinese grammar). Beijing, China: Peking University Press, 205–266)

Lucy J. (1992). Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Lucy J., Gaskins S. (2001). “Grammatical categories and the development of classification preferences: a comparative approach” in Language acquisition and conceptual development. eds. Bowerman M., Levinson S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ), 257–283.

Lucy J., Gaskins S. (2003). “Interaction of language type and referent type in the development of nonverbal classification preferences” in Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought. eds. Getner D., Goldin-Meadow S. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; ), 465–492.

Lüdtke J., Friedrich C. K., De Filippis M., Kaup B. (2008). Event-related potential correlates of negation in a sentence–picture verification paradigm. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 20, 1355–1370. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20093, PMID: PubMed DOI

Mayo R., Schul Y., Burnstein E. (2004). “I am not guilty” vs “I am innocent”: successful negation may depend on the schema used for its encoding. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 40, 433–449. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2003.07.008 DOI

Nieuwland M. S., Kuperberg G. R. (2008). When the truth is not too hard to handle: an event-related potential study on the pragmatics of negation. Psychol. Sci. 19, 1213–1218. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02226.x, PMID: PubMed DOI PMC

Orenes I., Beltrán D., Santamaría C. (2014). How negation is understood: evidence from the visual world paradigm. J. Mem. Lang. 74, 36–45. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2014.04.001 DOI

R Development Core Team (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: http://www.R-project.org/

Sera M. D., Berge C. A. H., Pintado J. D. C. (1994). Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers. Cogn. Dev. 9, 261–292. doi: 10.1016/0885-2014(94)90007-8 DOI

Sherman M. A. (1973). Bound to be easier? The negative prefix and sentence comprehension. J. Verb. Learn. Verb. Behav. 12, 76–84. doi: 10.1016/S0022-5371(73)80062-3 DOI

Sherman M. A. (1976). Adjectival negation and the comprehension of multiply negated sentences. J. Verb. Learn. Verb. Behav. 15, 143–157. doi: 10.1016/0022-5371(76)90015-3 DOI

Tettamanti M., Manenti R., Della P. A., Falini A., Perani D., Cappa S. F., et al. . (2008). Negation in the brain: modulating action representations. NeuroImage 43, 358–367. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.08.004, PMID: PubMed DOI

Thierry G., Athanasopoulos P., Wiggett A., Dering B., Kuipers J. R. (2009). Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 4567–4570. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811155106, PMID: PubMed DOI PMC

Tian Y., Breheny R., Ferguson H. J. (2010). Why we simulate negated information: a dynamic pragmatic account. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 63, 2305–2312. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2010.525712, PMID: PubMed DOI

Vanek N., Selinker L. (2017). Covariation between temporal interlanguage features and nonverbal event categorisation. Int. Rev. Appl. Linguist. Lang. Teach. 55, 223–243. doi: 10.1515/iral-2017-0106 DOI

Zhang H. (2019). From 'No, she does' to 'Yes, she does': On the conceptual changes in the processing of negative yes-no questions by Chinese-English bilinguals. Doctoral dissertation, University of York.

Zhang H., Vanek N. (2021). From “no, she does” to “yes, she does”: negation processing in negative yes–no questions by mandarin speakers of English. Appl. Psycholinguist. 42, 937–967. doi: 10.1017/S0142716421000175 DOI

Zhang H., Wang Y., Vanek N. (2022). Negation processing in Chinese–English bilinguals: insights from the Stroop paradigm and an orientation task. Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 25, 3711–3728. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2022.2074274 DOI

Zwaan R. A. (2016). Situation models, mental simulations, and abstract concepts in discourse comprehension. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 23, 1028–1034. doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0864-x, PMID: PubMed DOI PMC

Mental simulation of the factual and the illusory in negation processing: evidence from anticipatory eye movements on a blank screen