Processing Negation in the Context of Adjectival Antonymy

In a series of experimental studies we deal with processing negation in adjectives, with recognition of their affective value. For the studied material we chose adjectives describing people in categories of positive and negative characters. We used linguistic and extralinguistic negation (known also as external negation) to study the difficulty (measured in time of categorizing and number of mistakes) in processing negated adjectives which belonged to three groups, distinguished on the function of the morpheme "no". The main effect of negation type, as well as interaction of the negation factor and the affective sign of the adjectives, occurred in every group. The type of applied negation determined which adjectives, positive or negative, were categorized faster and more appropriately. The study showed close interaction between cognitive and affective processing.