Modeling affirmative and negated action processing in the brain with
lexical and compositional semantic models
Abstract
Recent work shows that distributional semantic models can be used to decode patterns of
brain activity associated with individual words
and sentence meanings. However, it is yet unclear to what extent such models can be used
to study and decode fMRI patterns associated
with specific aspects of semantic composition
such as the negation function. In this paper,
we apply lexical and compositional semantic models to decode fMRI patterns associated
with negated and affirmative sentences containing hand-action verbs. Our results show
reduced decoding (correlation) of sentences
where the verb is in the negated context, as
compared to the affirmative one, within brain
regions implicated in action-semantic processing. This supports behavioral and brain imaging studies, suggesting that negation involves
reduced access to aspects of the affirmative
mental representation. The results pave the
way for testing alternate semantic models of
negation against human semantic processing
in the brain.