The word "no" is one of many children's first words, and yet they do not begin to use and understand the full truth-functional logical negation meaning of "no" until long—sometimes close to a year—after they have begun to produce it. This delay has led researchers to propose that children's difficulty in learning negation langauge is with the concept negation itself. However, in typically developing infants, language learning and conceptual development happen in tandem, and so it is difficult to determine which of them is the primary limiting factor on children's acquisition of negation. We leveraged the natural experiment presented by internationally-adopted preschoolers, who are conceptaully mature but who face the same language learning task as infants, to tease apart these two factors. We found that international adoptees and L1 infants showed identical trajectories of beginning to express logical Denial negation, indicating that the major limitation on infant L1 learners' acquisition of negation is the task of learning language, not conceptual development.
In order to learn the meanings of words, children must solve two potentially separable tasks: to learn the mappings between words and their meanings, and to learn the concepts that underlie those meanings. This chapter examines the acquisition of negation by taking each of these tasks in turn. We argue that children's limited early uses of negation words reflect limited early meanings, but that the slow emergence of logical negation can be fully explained by the difficulty of learning the linguistic mappings, without the need to appeal to additional conceptual difficulty. Further, we argue that children are in posession of at least a precursor to the concept of logical negation—contrary—by 17 months. Even so, it remains possible that some conceptual development occurs between when children first use the word "no", and when they finally learn its truth-functional logical meaning, and we spell out a proposal for how the logically limited concept contrary could contribute to the construction of the concept negation. Finally, to test the possibility that langauge itself plays a role in the construction of negation, we propose that future work compare children's acquisition of negation across languages with varying mappings between words and meanings.
preprint publisher downloadPrevious research has suggested several stages for children’s production of negation. Some researchers have argued that the order of morpheme production follows a "no-not-n't" cline. Others have hypothesized stages where "no" appears outside the sentence and a stage where "can't" and "don't" are learned as unanalyzed wholes because "can" and "do" are not produced separately. In this study we bring more corpus data and novel analyses to bear on these hypotheses. The results suggest that "no" is produced earlier but "not" and "n't" are produced around the same time. We do not find evidence for a presentential stage or a stage where negative auxiliaries like "can't" and "don't" are produced without the positive forms like "can" and "do". Our findings are compatible with simultaneous development of frequent negative forms with a production bottleneck that favors shorter utterances like "no" to appear earlier.
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