Infants’ early understanding of different forms of negation Article Swipe
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· 2022
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/nfv4j
· OA: W4280499316
How do infants acquire the meaning of abstract words expressing negation? ‘No’ is among the first uttered words and emerges around the age of one, nevertheless, it is a subject of intense debate when and how exactly infants start interpreting utterances containing negation. According to one hypothesis, early in development, the comprehension and the production of verbal negation is restricted to a narrow range of meanings, for example to non-existence (‘No cookies’), and only much later infants develop a broader understanding and can correctly interpret propositional denial (‘Not x’) that may map onto a fully-fledged negation concept. Alternatively, however, they may rely on an adult-like negation concept from early on, but some forms of negations may pose more mapping difficulties. Here we tested infants’ understanding of two syntactically and semantically different forms of negation, existential negation and propositional denial. We engaged 15- and 18-month-old infants in a search task where they had to find a toy in one out of two locations based on verbal utterances involving existential negation or propositional denial. In Experiments 1-3 we found a parallel development for these two kinds of negation. 18-month-olds successfully comprehended both, while 15-month-olds did not understand either forms of negation. In Experiment 4 we excluded the possibility that 15-month-olds’ poor performance is explained by task-related difficulties. The parallel performance of the two age groups in the tasks involving two types of negation suggests that different forms of negation may share common conceptual underpinnings already in early development.
