Is your coffee 'not hot' or 'cold'? Observing how the brain processes negated adjectives

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Negating an adjective by placing 'not' in front of it affects the way our brains interpret its meaning, mitigating but not entirely inverting our interpretation of its definition. In a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, Arianna Zuanazzi at New York University, US, and colleagues offer insight into how the brain represents changes of meaning over time and offer new methods for further linguistic research.

The way the brain processes negated adjectives—'not bad' or 'not good'—is not understood. Previous studies suggest that negated phrases are processed more slowly and with more errors than their affirmative counterparts. Cutting-edge artificial neural networks appear to be largely insensitive to the contextual impacts of negation, leading many researchers to wonder how negation operates.

In lab-based experiments, 78 participants were asked to read affirmative or negated adjective phrases, good/bad, not good/not bad, happy/sad, not happy/not sad etc. on a screen and rate their meaning on a scale of one (really really bad/really really sad) to 10 (really really good/really really happy).

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