Neural and behavioural mechanisms underlying the processing of negated meanings

Negations are a basic but fundamental part of language. In childhood, we learn about the concept of opposition. The weather is good or it is not.   Negation or negated meanings are processed in the brain. Sara Farschi looks at how the processing of these meanings are affected by context and the flexibility of language. This thesis combines a number of methodologies and measures in order to address the processing of two types of negation (with not and un) in relation to each other and to non-negated affirmative meanings. The four investigations in this thesis target the processing of these meanings at different levels, namely the word level (Study 1) and sentence level (Studies 2–4). The findings of the studies in this thesis contribute new knowledge to a dynamic view of meaning and language processing and suggest that the processing of negated meanings, similar to many other linguistic phenomena, is not only sensitive to the properties of individual words and expressions but is also modulated by contextual factors. <link https: portal.research.lu.se portal en persons external link in new>Sara Farshchi i universitetets forskningsportal.