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• W2402805813 abstract "A pragmatic account of the processing of negative sentences Ann E. Nordmeyer Michael C. Frank anordmey@stanford.edu Department of Psychology Stanford University mcfrank@stanford.edu Department of Psychology Stanford University Abstract Previous work suggests that negative sentences are more dif- ficult to process than positive sentences. A supportive con- text, however, can mitigate this effect. We investigate the role of context on negation by measuring the processing cost of negation with and without a visual context (Study 1) and then systematically varying the strength of the context (Study 2). We find that a supportive visual context has a graded effect on negation processing. We then create a model to compute the informativeness of an utterance in context, and find that a model that considers both the surprisal of an utterance and the surprisal of seeing a referent is highly correlated with reaction times. Our data suggest that pragmatic factors likely explain the processing costs of negation. Keywords: Negation; sentence processing; pragmatics; Bayesian modeling. Introduction Language is a powerful tool that allows us to describe not only the state of the world as we see it, but also the world as it is not. If I am a regular at a coffee shop and always order chai, but the shop has run out today, the barista might say “We don’t have any chai today” when I enter. Negative sentences are very informative when expectations are violated. Although negation is critical for communicating many meanings, processing negative sentences can be slow and ef- fortful. In sentence verification tasks, participants who are asked to evaluate the truth of a sentence describing a pic- ture take significantly longer to evaluate negative sentences compared to positive ones (Clark & Chase, 1972; Carpen- ter & Just, 1975; Just & Carpenter, 1971, 1976). In EEG experiments, sentences in which the final noun is semanti- cally unexpected elicit an N400 response, and this response is found even when a negative makes the sentence logically true (e.g. “A robin [is/is not] a truck”)—suggesting that nega- tion is slow to integrate with the rest of the sentence (Fischler, Bloom, Childers, Roucos, & Perry, 1983; L¨udtke, Friedrich, De Filippis, & Kaup, 2008). Similar results have been found in probe-recognition tasks (Kaup & Zwaan, 2003; Kaup, Ludtke, & Zwaan, 2006; Hasson & Glucksberg, 2006). Col- lectively, this work suggests that processing negative sen- tences is often difficult. There is a critical difference, however, between evaluating a sentence in the lab and comprehending speech in the real world. According to Grice’s Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975), speakers should produce utterances that are truthful, relevant, and informative. Negative sentences presented with- out context violate this principle. If the barista says “we don’t have chai today” to a customer who always orders coffee, this utterance would be neither relevant nor informative. In gen- eral, negations are produced when there is some expectation that the speaker wishes to reverse. Congruent with this Gricean account, a number of stud- ies have shown that a supportive context mitigates the pro- cessing cost of negation (Wason, 1965; Glenberg, Robertson, Jansen, & Johnson-Glenberg, 1999; L¨udtke & Kaup, 2006; Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008; Dale & Duran, 2011). Some contexts are more effective than others at reducing process- ing demands. For example, contexts that explicitly mention a negated characteristic (L¨udtke & Kaup, 2006) or that present the negation within a dialogue (Dale & Duran, 2011) elicit faster reaction times, perhaps because the negation is more in- formative. But although these findings are congruent with the idea that pragmatic expectations are the source of negation’s processing cost, they do not directly test that hypothesis. The goal of our current work is to make such a test. We propose that negative sentences are more informative in contexts that set up a strong expectation that is violated. If the processing cost of negation is pragmatic, then more informa- tive negative sentences should elicit smaller reaction times. How should we quantify informativeness in context? Recent modeling work quantifies pragmatic reasoning in simple ex- perimental contexts (Frank & Goodman, 2012; Goodman & Stuhlm¨uller, 2013). The assumption underlying this work is that speakers are informative—they will produce utterances that will pick out smaller subsets of the context, leaving as little ambiguity as possible for the listener. We use this defi- nition of informativeness to provide a quantitative interpreta- tion of our hypothesis. To link informativeness—as computed in a probabilistic model—to reaction time, we assume that reaction time is pro- portional to surprisal. Surprisal is an information-theoretic measure of the amount of information carried by an event (in this case, an utterance in some context) based on its proba- bility. Surprisal has been used effectively to predict reaction times from probabilistic models (Levy, 2008); this work pro- vides inspiration for our current model. We test the hypothesis that pragmatic surprisal explains the processing cost of negative sentences. Study 1 measures this processing cost, replicating previous findings that context fa- cilitates the processing of negation. Study 2 investigates the effect of the strength of the context by parametrically vary- ing the base rate of a negated feature. We compute the sur- prisal of sentences in these contexts, and find that a model of pragmatic informativeness predicts the relationship between context and reaction time. These results support the idea that context affects negative sentence processing by modulating listeners’ expectations." @default.
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• W2402805813 title "A pragmatic account of the processing of negative sentences" @default.
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