Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Negation in natural language is not interpreted as a simple logical complement but is resolved selectively, depending on how linguistic and conceptual structure constrain relevant alternatives. Psycholinguistic research suggests that negation facilitates consideration of an alternative only when a privileged counterstate is available, either through contextual restriction or graded prominence. We use text-to-image generation as a complementary method to probe this selectivity under forced representational commitment: when negated language must be rendered visually, a concrete state must be instantiated. Across two preregistered experiments, participants evaluated how well generated images matched affirmative and negated prompts. Experiment 1 shows that negation is resolved more successfully for predicates encoding conventionalized contrasts than for those with open alternative spaces. Experiment 2 shows that, within open spaces, negation is facilitated when a highly prominent alternative exists. Together, the results support an account in which binary advantages arise from how strongly a counterstate is privileged.