Psychological Processing Of Chinese And English Negative Sentences Based On Two - Step Simulation Hypothesis

Language has long been an important way to study human mind by linguists and psychologists. As a universal concept of language, negation also receives large amount of attention because, among other things, it is one of the simplest of a class of common linguistic devices involving two alternative possibilities.Initially comprehension of negation is interpreted in a propositional representation context, but this theory faces great challenges from an experiential-simulation view of embodied cognition for its inefficiency in accounting for the implied information of images in the sentences. Under this framework a two-step simulation hypothesis was proposed by. B. Kaup after a series of experimental studies. According to this hypothesis comprehension of negation takes two stages of representation, the simulation of negated text information and then the simulation of the actual state of affairs.This research investigated in two experiments the representation of Chinese and English negative sentences in isolation, one as a first language and the other as a second language to participants on the basis of two-step Simulation Hypothesis. A mixed experiment design of 2 (sentence types:positive, negative)×2 (matching/mismatch)× 3 (time intervals) was employed with a paradigm of self-paced reading and recognition task. Experiment 1 on Chinese negation did not yield any advantage effect of either the negated information or the actual state, indicating the non-effectiveness of the working hypothesis on Chinese negations. Experiment 2 on English negations gives rise to two obvious stages of negated and actual states, supporting the hypothesis, though not significantly strong. Such differences was then interpreted in the propositional and perceptual presentation context with a conclusion that:Processing English and Chinese negation resorts to different modes of representation. Two-step Simulation Hypothesis, though seemingly effective in accounting for English negative sentences, cannot predict the process of Chinese one-step negation comprehension, in which the actual state is immediately represented.It can be predicted from this research that processing and representing isolated negative sentences draws upon a fused model of both propositional representation and perceptual simulation. The former relates the information and message to comprehenders’ existing experience, and the latter serves as linguistic device to decode specific structural information.