查看文章

How linguistic negation is processed online has been a long-standing issue in psycho-and neurolinguistics. In this study, we investigated negation processing in two distinct types of sentences with truth value evaluation (eg,‘A robin is a/not a bird’), and without (eg,‘The woman reads a/no book’), focusing on electroencephalogram (EEG) indices in terms of the N400 component and oscillatory power and inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC). Across both sentence constructions, we observed enhanced N400 and increased ITPC in the theta band for semantically unrelated target words, irrespective of negation. However for the theta power, we observed distinct modulation effects of negation on semantic-relatedness for two types of sentence constructions. In addition, we showed that direct comparison between affirmative and negative target words led to effects in the N400 and theta power in a nuanced manner. Our findings provide novel evidence on a more interactive role of negation during online sentence processing.