Date of Graduation

5-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Psychological Science

Advisor/Mentor

William H. Levine

Committee Member

Douglas A. Behrend

Second Committee Member

Ellen W. Leen-Feldner

Keywords

Literature, Psychology, Activation, Negation, Pragmatics, Reading, Representation

Abstract

Research on the activation of negated concepts has demonstrated situations in which negated concepts are less active than non-negated concepts (e.g., MacDonald & Just, 1989) as well as situations where negated and non-negated concepts are equally active (e.g., Autry & Levine, 2012, in press). Based on the pragmatic inference hypothesis (Levine & Hagaman, 2008), the present experiments tested the hypothesis that the activation level of negated concepts is a function of the context in which they occur. In two experiments, the activation level of target concepts was measured following licensing or non-licensing contexts using lexical decision and reading times. Although Experiment 1 suggested that subjects inferred the target concept in the licensing contexts more than in the non-licensing contexts, Experiment 2 did not find the predicted evidence of a differential negation effect in licensing and non-licensing contexts. These findings suggest that licensing does not affect the activation of negated concepts.

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