Comprehending negation: A study with adults diagnosed with high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.We investigated whether readers with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome (HA/AS) differ from normal controls with respect to pragmatic aspects of negation processing. We presented short stories to two groups of readers, a group of individuals diagnosed with HA/AS and a group of normal controls. The final sentence of each story either affirmed or negated a particular proposition, which in the pragmatically felicitous context corresponded to a highly plausible assumption for the situation at hand, but in the pragmatically infelicitous context to an implausible assumption. In line with our predictions, the group of healthy controls read the negative but not the affirmative target sentences more slowly in the pragmatically infelicitous than in the pragmatically felicitous contexts. In the pragmatically felicitous context, reading times for negative sentences were as fast as those for affirmative sentences. In contrast, for the clinical group, the context had no effect: Reading times for the negative target sentences were longer than those of the affirmative target sentences in both context versions. These results indicate that individuals with HA/AS indeed differ from normal controls with respect to negation processing. Moreover, these results are in line with the more general hypothesis that the differences between normal individuals and those with HA/AS concern pragmatic aspects of language processing

Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production

The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually presented sentence fragments (e.g., “You are at the sea and you see a . . .”) with spoken nouns (e.g., “dolphin,” “palm tree”). The words were presented consecutively in an ascending or descending direction, starting from the centre of the screen. These physical spatial cues did not influence lexical choices. However, the produced nouns met the spatial characteristics of the broader sentence contexts such that the typical spatial locations of the produced noun referents were predicted by the location of the situations described by the sentence fragments (i.e., upper or lower sphere). By including distributional semantic similarity measures derived from computing cosine values between sentence nouns and produced nouns using a web-based text corpus, we show that the meaning dimension of “location in space” guides lexical selection during speaking. We discuss the relation of this spatial meaning dimension to accounts of experientially grounded and usage-based theories of language processing and their combination in hybrid approaches. In doing so, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the many facets of meaning processing during language production and their impact on the words we select to express verbal messages.Peer Reviewe

The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1034)Peer Reviewe

"The drawer is still closed": simulating past and future actions when processing sentences that describe a state

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Emotional valence and physical space: Limits of interaction

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand, and negative things with the side corresponding to their non-dominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study employing linguistic stimuli, and whether such an association is activated automatically. Four experiments explored this association using positive and negative words. In Exp. 1, right-handers made a lexical judgment by pressing a left or right key. Attention was not explicitly drawn to the valence of the stimuli. No valence-by-side interaction emerged. In Exp. 2 and 3, right-handers and left-handers made a valence judgment by pressing a left or a right key. A valence-by-side interaction emerged: For positive words, responses were faster when participants responded with their dominant hand, whereas for negative words, responses were faster for the non-dominant hand. Exp. 4 required a valence judgment without stating an explicit mapping of valence and side. No valence-by-side interaction emerged. The experiments provide evidence for an association between response side and valence, which, however, does not seem to be activated automatically but rather requires a task with an explicit response mapping to occur

Keep your hands crossed: The valence-by-left/right interaction is related to hand, not side, in an incongruent hand-response key assignment

The body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009) associates positive emotional valence and the space surrounding the dominant hand, and negative valence and the space surrounding the nondominant hand. This effect has not only been found for manual responses, but also for the left and right side. In the present study, we investigated whether this compatibility effect still shows when hand and side carry incongruent information, and whether it is then related to hand or to side. We conducted two experiments which used an incongruent hand – response key assignment, that is, participants had their hands crossed. Participants were instructed to respond with their right vs. left hand (Experiment 1) or with the right vs. left key (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a compatibility effect related to hand emerged, indicating that the association between hand and valence overrides the one between side and valence when hand and side carry contradicting information

The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (1020)Peer Reviewe

Integration of Visual Information about the Speaker during Sentence Processing

Do sentence meaning and contextual information get integrated in one-step or is the integration of extra-linguistic variables delayed to a second step? There are findings which point in the direction of one-step models of language comprehension. However, as of yet it is unclear to what extent these reflect low-level associations. To investigate this possibility, we manipulated the polarity of the sentences. A negative sentence still includes the critical word but now describes a plausible situation and should thus not lead to comprehension difficulties unless these are based on low-level associations. In two phrasal self-paced reading studies, we found a mismatch effect independent of polarity early on in the sentence on the phrase involving the critical word and the following phrase. An interaction appeared only at the sentence end, reflecting the mismatch effect for affirmative but not for negated sentences on that phrase. These results suggest an early word-based effect. Readers seem not to fully integrate the meaning of a sentence and the extra-linguistic information about a speaker until the end of a sentence – which seem to fit well with two-step models of comprehension. The influence of pragmatic aspects of negation in speaker-based mismatch effects are discussed

How Reliable Is Ki-67 Immunohistochemistry in Grade 2 Breast Carcinomas? A QA Study of the Swiss Working Group of Breast- and Gynecopathologists

Adjuvant chemotherapy decisions in breast cancer are increasingly based on the pathologist's assessment of tumor proliferation. The Swiss Working Group of Gyneco- and Breast Pathologists has surveyed inter- and intraobserver consistency of Ki-67-based proliferative fraction in breast carcinomas. Methods Five pathologists evaluated MIB-1-labeling index (LI) in ten breast carcinomas (G1, G2, G3) by counting and eyeballing. In the same way, 15 pathologists all over Switzerland then assessed MIB-1-LI on three G2 carcinomas, in self-selected or pre-defined areas of the tumors, comparing centrally immunostained slides with slides immunostained in the different laboratoires. To study intra-observer variability, the same tumors were re-examined 4 months later. Results The Kappa values for the first series of ten carcinomas of various degrees of differentiation showed good to very good agreement for MIB-1-LI (Kappa 0.56–0.72). However, we found very high inter-observer variabilities (Kappa 0.04–0.14) in the read-outs of the G2 carcinomas. It was not possible to explain the inconsistencies exclusively by any of the following factors: (i) pathologists' divergent definitions of what counts as a positive nucleus (ii) the mode of assessment (counting vs. eyeballing), (iii) immunostaining technique, and (iv) the selection of the tumor area in which to count. Despite intensive confrontation of all participating pathologists with the problem, inter-observer agreement did not improve when the same slides were re-examined 4 months later (Kappa 0.01–0.04) and intra-observer agreement was likewise poor (Kappa 0.00–0.35). Conclusion Assessment of mid-range Ki-67-LI suffers from high inter- and intra-observer variability. Oncologists should be aware of this caveat when using Ki-67-LI as a basis for treatment decisions in moderately differentiated breast carcinomas