Inhibitory Mechanisms in the Processing of Negations: A Neural Reuse Hypothesis

David Beltrán,Bo Liu,Manuel De Vega

doi:10.1007/s10936-021-09796-x

Abstract

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript offers the hypothesis that negation reuses general-domain mechanisms that subserve inhibition in other non-linguistic cognitive functions. The first two sections describe the inhibitory effects of negation on conceptual representations and its embodied effects, as well as the theoretical foundations for the reuse hypothesis. The next section describes the neurophysiological evidence that linguistic negation interacts with response inhibition, along with the suggestion that both functions share inhibitory mechanisms. Finally, the manuscript concludes that the functional relation between negation and inhibition observed at the mechanistic level could be easily integrated with predominant cognitive models of negation processing.

Highlights

Negation markers such as no figure among the first words uttered by children (e.g., Dale & Fenson, 1996), rank high among the most frequent words in many languages, and are used for a wide range of communicative purposes (e.g., Horn, 1989)
The above sections have presented both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that support the hypothesis that negation processing is implemented at the mechanistic level by the reuse of general-domain inhibitory mechanisms
The neurophysiological interactions between negation and response inhibition reported here suggest that both share similar inhibitory mechanisms

Summary

Introduction

Negation markers such as no figure among the first words uttered by children (e.g., Dale & Fenson, 1996), rank high among the most frequent words in many languages (for example, position 11 in the largest Spanish Corpus, Web-Dialects, 2016), and are used for a wide range of communicative purposes (e.g., rejection, denial, and talk of absence) (e.g., Horn, 1989). The inclusion of a negative marker in the same sentence (The flower is not yellow) calls for representing both the negated situation (a yellow flower) and what might be the factual situation (e.g., a flower of a different color) According to this theory, negation is representationally more complex because it requires two instead of only one mental representation. In the case of negation, cognitive control is supposed to monitor the competition between representations, and to help to resolve it in one specific direction: deactivating the representation of the negated information, and giving prominence to the factual situation (e.g., Beltrán et al, 2019; Dudschig & Kaup, 2020a, b) In this manuscript, the focus will be on the mechanisms that implement the deactivation or inhibition of the negated situation.

Negation has Inhibitory Consequences

Negation Could Reuse Inhibitory Mechanisms

Negation Interacts with Response Inhibition

Findings

Conclusions