Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent work shows that distributional semantic models can be used to decode patterns of brain activity associated withindividual words and sentence meanings. However, it is yet unclear to what extent such models can be used to study anddecode brain activity patterns associated with specific aspects of semantic composition such as the negation function. Inthis paper, we investigate the extent to which distributional semantic models of action-verbs correlate with brain activityassociated with negated and affirmative sentences containing hand-action verbs. Our results show reduced correlations forsentences where the verb is in the negated context, as compared to the affirmative one, within brain regions implicated inaction-semantic processing. The results lend support to the idea that negation involves reduced access to aspects of theaffirmative representation and pave the way for further testing alternate distributional-based semantic models of negationagainst human semantic processing in the brain.