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Reactivation Of Negated Concepts Over Time, Kevin Autry

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on the mental representation of negated concepts in written texts has yet to reach a consensus about the effects of negation. MacDonald and Just (1989) reported that after reading a sentence with a negation, negated words took longer to recognize than non-negated words, which suggests that the negated concepts became less active. However, Hasson and Glucksberg (2006) found that after reading negative metaphors (e.g., This surgeon isn't a butcher), lexical decisions about words consistent with the affirmative sense of the negated word (e.g., clumsy) took less time than for control words. To reconcile these (and other) incompatible findings, two …