Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study.

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words' tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

Modal and amodal cognition: an overarching principle in various domains of psychology.

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this paper, we suggest that both formats play a major role in most cognitive domains. We believe that a comprehensive theory of cognition requires a solid understanding of these representational formats and their functional roles within and across different domains of cognition, the developmental trajectory of these representational formats, and their role in dysfunctional behavior. Here we sketch such an overarching perspective that brings together research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology on modal and amodal representational formats so as to unravel their functional principles and their interactions.

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task.

Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments (The child will [not] eat the . . .) in combination with four potential continuations: yoghurt (a plausible word), shellfish (a weak world knowledge violating word), branch (a severe world knowledge violating word), and minivan (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (The child has [not] eaten the yoghurt). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.

Multimodal aspects of sentence comprehension: Do facial and color cues interact with processing negated and affirmative sentences?

Negation is usually considered as a linguistic operator reversing the truth value of a proposition. However, there are various ways to express negation in a multimodal manner. It still remains an unresolved issue whether nonverbal expressions of negation can influence linguistic negation comprehension. Based on extensive evidence demonstrating that language comprehenders are able to instantly integrate extralinguistic information such as a speaker's identity, we expected that nonverbal cues of negation and affirmation might similarly affect sentence comprehension. In three preregistered experiments, we examined how far nonverbal markers of negation and affirmation-specifically, the so-called "not face" (see Benitez-Quiroz et al., 2016) and red or green color (see Dudschig et al., 2023)-interact with comprehending negation and affirmation at the sentential level. Participants were presented with photos ("not face" vs. positive control; Experiments 1 and 2) or color patches (red vs. green; Experiment 3). They then read negated and affirmative sentences in a self-paced manner or judged the sensibility of negated and affirmative sentences (e.g., "No, I do not want to sing" vs. "Yes, I would like to buy a sofa"). Both frequentist statistics and Bayes factors resulting from linear mixed-effects analyses showed that processing times for negated and affirmative sentences were not significantly modulated by the nonverbal features under investigation. This indicates that their influence might not extend to sentential negation or affirmation comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive control mechanisms in language processing: are there both within- and across-task conflict adaptation effects?

Cognitive conflict is regarded as a crucial factor in triggering subsequent adjustments in cognitive control. Recent studies have suggested that the implementation of control following conflict detection might be domain-general in that conflict experienced in the language domain recruits control processes that deal with conflict experienced in non-linguistic domains. During language comprehension, humans often have to recover from conflicting interpretations as quickly and accurately as possible. In this study, we investigate how people adapt to conflict experienced during processing semantically ambiguous sentences. Experiments 1 to 3 investigated whether such semantic conflict produces the congruency sequence effect (CSE) within a subsequent manual Stroop task and whether Stroop conflict leads to adjustments in semantic processing. Experiments 4 to 6 investigated whether semantic conflict results in conflict adaptation in subsequent sentence processing. Although processing conflict was consistently experienced during sentence reading and in the Stroop task, we did not observe any within-task or cross-task adaptation effects. Specifically, there were no cross-task CSEs from the linguistic task to the Stroop task and vice versa (experiments 1-3)-speaking against the assumption of domain-general control mechanisms. Moreover, experiencing conflict within a semantically ambiguous sentence did not ease the processing of a subsequent ambiguous sentence (experiments 4-6). Implications of these findings will be discussed.

Replacing vertical actions by mouse movements: a web-suited paradigm for investigating vertical spatial associations.

The number of web-based studies in experimental psychology has been growing tremendously throughout the last few years. However, a straightforward web-based implementation does not exist for all types of experimental paradigms. In the current paper, we focus on how vertical response movements-which play a crucial role in spatial cognition and language research-can be translated into a web-based setup. Specifically, we introduce a web-suited counterpart of the vertical Stroop task (e.g., Fox & Shor, in Bull Psychon Soc 7:187-189, 1976; Lachmair et al., in Psychon Bull Rev 18:1180-1188, 2011; Thornton et al., in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 39:964-973, 2013). We employed nouns referring to entities typically located in lower or upper vertical space (e.g., "worm" and "bird", respectively) in Experiments 1 and 2, and emotional valence words associated with a crouched or an upward bodily posture (e.g., "sadness" and "excitement", respectively) in Experiment 3. Depending on the font color, our participants used their mouse to drag the words to the lower or upper screen location. Across all experiments, we consistently observed congruency effects analogous to those obtained with the lab paradigm using actual vertical arm movements. Consequently, we conclude that our web-suited paradigm establishes a reliable approach to examining vertical spatial associations.

The grounding of logical operations: The role of color, shape, and emotional faces for "yes" or "no" decisions.

Concerning the evolution of our mind, it is of core interest to understand how high-level cognitive functions are embedded within low-level cognitive functions. While the grounding of meaning units such as content words and sentence has been widely investigated, little is known about logical cognitive operations and their association with nonlinguistic cognition. However, recent theoretical claims have suggested that "the foundations of logical oppositions and negation may well be much more deeply rooted in the physiological structure of human cognition than is standardly assumed" (p. 227, Jaspers, 2012). The present study investigated potential candidates for such a grounding process by exploring the associations between basic "yes" versus "no" decisions and nonlinguistic features. In five preregistered experiments investigating the interplay between deciding "yes" or "no" and color, shape, and facial expressions, there was converging evidence for the intercoupling between the process of performing a "yes" (agreeing) or "no" (rejecting) decision and emotional faces (happy/sad), color (green/red), and also shape (round/square and soft/sharp). Potential mechanisms for such associations are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Sentence-based mental simulations: Evidence from behavioral experiments using garden-path sentences.

Language comprehenders activate mental representations of sensorimotor experiences related to the content of utterances they process. However, it is still unclear whether these sensorimotor simulations are driven by associations with words or by a more complex process of meaning composition into larger linguistic expressions, such as sentences. In two experiments, we investigated whether comprehenders indeed create sentence-based simulations. Materials were constructed such that simulation effects could only emerge from sentence meaning and not from word-based associations alone. We additionally asked when during sentence processing these simulations are constructed, using a garden-path paradigm. Participants read either a garden-path sentence (e.g., "As Mary ate the egg was in the fridge") or a corresponding unambiguous control with the same meaning and words (e.g., "The egg was in the fridge as Mary ate"). Participants then judged whether a depicted entity was mentioned in the sentence or not. In both experiments, picture response times were faster when the picture was compatible (vs. incompatible) with the sentence-based interpretation of the target entity (e.g., both for garden-path and control sentence: an unpeeled egg), suggesting that participants created simulations based on the sentence content and only operating over the sentence as a whole.

The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE): Meta-analysis of a benchmark finding for embodiment.

The embodied account of language comprehension has been one of the most influential theoretical developments in the recent decades addressing the question how humans comprehend and represent language. To examine its assumptions, many studies have made use of behavioral paradigms involving basic compatibility effects. The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) is one of the most influential of these compatibility effects and is the most widely cited evidence for the embodied account of language comprehension. However, recently there have been difficulties in extending or even in reliably replicating the ACE. The conflicting findings concerning the ACE and its extensions lead to the discussion of whether the ACE is indeed a reliable effect. In a first step we conducted a meta-analysis using a random-effects model. This analysis revealed a small but significant effect size of the ACE. Furthermore, the task-parameter Delay occurred as a factor of interest in whether the ACE appears with positive or negative effect direction. A second meta-analytic approach (Fisher's method) supports these findings. Additionally, an analysis of publication bias suggests that there is bias in the ACE literature. In post-hoc analyses of the recent multi-lab investigation of the ACE (Morey et al., 2021), evidence for individual differences in the ACE was found. However, further analyses indicate that these differences are likely due to item-specific variability and the specific way in which items were assigned to conditions in the counterbalancing lists.

Are control processes domain-general? A replication of 'To adapt or not to adapt? The question of domain-general cognitive control' (Kan et al. 2013).

Conflict and conflict adaptation are well-studied phenomena in experimental psychology. Standard tasks investigating causes and outcomes of conflict during information processing include the Stroop, the Flanker and the Simon task. Interestingly, recent research efforts have moved toward investigating whether conflict in one task domain influences information processing in another task domain, typically referred to as cross-task conflict adaptation. These transfer effects are of central importance for theories about our cognitive architecture, as they are interpreted as pointing towards domain-general cognitive mechanisms. Given the importance of these cross-task transfer effects, the current paper targets at replicating one of the key findings. Specifically, Kan et al. (Kan et al. 2013 Cognition 129, 637-651) showed that reading syntactically ambiguous sentences result in processing adjustments in subsequent Stroop trials. This result is in line with the idea that conflict monitoring works in a domain overarching manner. The present paper presents two replication studies: (i) exact replication: identical sentence-reading task intermixed with stimulus-based Stroop task and (ii) conceptual replication: identical sentence-reading task intermixed with response-based Stroop task. Power calculations were based on the original paper. Both experiments were pre-registered. Despite the experiments being closely designed according to the original study, there was no evidence supporting the hypothesis regarding cross-domain conflict adaptation.

Language and non-linguistic cognition: Shared mechanisms and principles reflected in the N400.

Language is a core cognitive faculty. Research on language processing is typically carried out independently of research within other cognitive domains. However, it has been proposed that language shares basic sensorimotor features with non-linguistic cognition at the representational level. The present paper investigates whether processing principles are also shared between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition; specifically, it is investigated whether the N400 is sensitive to global and local manipulations of violation probability as previously reported for markers of non-linguistic conflict detection. In Experiment 1, the global violation probability was manipulated. Here, N400 amplitude was reduced in high violation probability blocks compared to low violation probability blocks. In Experiment 2, N400 amplitude was analysed according to local trial sequence. Here, the N400 amplitude difference between correct and violated sentences was reduced when the preceding trial was a violation compared to a correct trial. The implication of these findings for the architecture of our cognitive system is discussed.

The limits of automatic sensorimotor processing during word processing: investigations with repeated linguistic experience, memory consolidation during sleep, and rich linguistic learning contexts.

While a number of studies have repeatedly demonstrated an automatic activation of sensorimotor experience during language processing in the form of action-congruency effects, as predicted by theories of grounded cognition, more recent research has not found these effects for words that were just learned from linguistic input alone, without sensorimotor experience with their referents. In the present study, we investigate whether this absence of effects can be attributed to a lack of repeated experience and consolidation of the associations between words and sensorimotor experience in memory. To address these issues, we conducted four experiments in which (1 and 2) participants engaged in two separate learning phases in which they learned novel words from language alone, with an intervening period of memory-consolidating sleep, and (3 and 4) we employed familiar words whose referents speakers have no direct experience with (such as plankton). However, we again did not observe action-congruency effects in subsequent test phases in any of the experiments. This indicates that direct sensorimotor experience with word referents is a necessary requirement for automatic sensorimotor activation during word processing.

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.

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.

Conceptual representation of real-world surface material: Early integration with linguistic-labels indicated in the N400-component.

Research in perception in the visual and auditory domains has traditionally focused on investigating highly controlled artificial stimulus material. However, a key feature of our perceptual system is the ease with which the input of a wide set of naturalistic co-occurring information is dealt with. This study investigated whether, during perception of real-world surface material, a conceptual representation is built that has the potential to interact with a linguistic description of the material directly. Short sentences were presented (e.g., This surface is smooth) followed by a matching or mismatching picture of a real-world surface material. The results showed early cross-modal integration effects during material surface perception in an N400-like potential, originating approximately 280 ms after stimulus presentation. Overall, these findings suggest a rather early influence of linguistic information on material perception, suggesting that in line with object representation, real-world materials are represented in the brain in a format that allows interaction with non-visual information.

Negation Processing in Children with ADHD: The Generic Problem of Using Negation in Instructions.

Recent studies have suggested that negation comprehension falls back onto inhibitory brain systems that are also crucial for impulse control and other non-linguistic control domains (Beltran et al., 2018, 2019; de Vega et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, the present pilot study investigated the use of negation within directional instructions (i.e., "not left", "now left", "not right", "now right") in children with ADHD and a control group. The results indicate that children in general have a long response delay following negative compared to affirmative instructions. Additionally, there was a tendency for this effect to be more pronounced in the ADHD group. Together, these results suggest that negation processing might indeed demand inhibitory control processes, which are differently available across different subgroups. Thus, the current study provides evidence that using negation in imperatives or instructions is generally rather critical and should be avoided if possible, but that negation use is probably even more problematic in specific clinical populations. Potential implications of these results will be discussed.

Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation.

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., "This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver"). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.

Pictorial vs. linguistic negation: Investigating negation in imperatives across different symbol domains.

The processing of negation is typically regarded as one of the most demanding cognitive processes as it often involves the reversal of input information. As negation is also regarded as a core linguistic process, to date, investigations of negation have typically been linguistic in nature. However, negation is a standard operator also within non-linguistic domains. For example, traffic signs often use negation to indicate a prohibition of specific actions (e.g., no left turn). In the current study, we investigate whether processing difficulties that are typically reported within the linguistic domain generalize to pictorial negation. Across two experiments, linguistic negation and pictorial negation were directly compared to their affirmative counterparts. In line with the literature, the results show that there is a general processing benefit for pictorial input. Most interestingly, the core process of negation also benefits from the pictorial input. Specifically, the processing difficulty in pictorial negation compared to affirmation is less pronounced than within the linguistic domain, especially concerning error rates. In the current experiments, pictorial negation did not result in increased error rates compared to the affirmative condition. Overall, the current results suggest that negation in pictorial conditions also results in a slowing of information processing. However, the use of pictorial negation can ease processing difficulty over linguistic negation.

Can We Prepare to Negate? Negation as a Reversal Operator.

Negation is a critical cognitive operator that is investigated across a wide range of psychological phenomena (e.g., language, eating control, emotion control, stereotype processing). A core function of negation is reversing input information. In the current study, we investigated whether this reversing process benefits from temporal preparation. In Experiment 1, participants were first presented with either the negator "not" or the affirmative counterpart "now", and in a variable delay with the response indicating stimulus "left" or "right". Participants had to respond according to phrase meaning (e.g., "now right" ➔ right response; "not right" ➔ left response). The results showed a persisting negation effect of 150 ms that did not reduce with preparatory time. In Experiment 2, we replicated this study using non-linguistic input information (i.e. crosses, tick-marks and arrows). Again, despite standard temporal preparation effects being present, the reversal process itself did not benefit from preparatory time. In summary, these experiments suggest that capacity demanding reversal processes are not eased if we know that a reversal process is coming up soon. This is particularly interesting, as in the current experiments a very basic binary negation paradigm was implemented. The implications of these results for models of negation processing are discussed.

Negation as conflict: Conflict adaptation following negating vertical spatial words.

In this study, we investigated whether the processing of negated directional terms such as "not up" or "not down" poses a conflict for participants and results in similar processing adjustments as non-linguistic conflicts do (Dudschig & Kaup, 2019). In each trial, participants read one of the following four phrases "now up", "not up", "now down" or "not down" and responded with a button press on a response key mounted in the upper versus lower vertical space. Behavioral data indicated that processing negated phrases leads to considerable processing difficulties for participants even after extensive practice. Interestingly, in line with standard conflict adaptation effects reported in the Simon, the Flanker and the Stroop task, negation processing was facilitated when preceded by another high conflict trial (i.e. a negated trial) as compared to a low conflict trial (i.e. an affirmative phrase). In addition, electrophysiological data showed that in negated trials first the to-be-negated information was activated (i.e., up in the case of "not up") and only in a second step, the outcome of the negation process was represented (i.e. down). In line with behavioral data, electrophysiological data was modified by trial sequence, suggesting negation triggering standard conflict adaptation patterns. Taken together, conflict-related processing adjustments can be also observed if the conflict is triggered by linguistic negation of vertical directional words. Implications of these findings are discussed.