Getting to <i>No</i>: Pragmatic and Semantic Factors in Two‐ and Three‐Year‐Olds' Understanding of Negation

Reuter, Tracy; Feiman, Roman; Snedeker, Jesse

doi:10.1111/cdev.12858

Cited by 33 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(68 reference statements)

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“…These findings suggest that negative sentences are processed in a fully incremental manner as long as they are used in an appropriate pragmatic context, supporting the view that negation is inherently contextual (e.g., Glenberg, Robertson, Jansen, & Johnson-Glenberg, 1999) and that negatives are not necessarily any more difficult to process than affirmatives (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Tridgell, 1972;Wason 1965). Developmental research has identified similar patterns in young children: for example, negative sentences are more readily understood and accepted by 3-and 4-year-olds when presented in a pragmatically supportive context (Nordmeyer & Frank, 2018), although 2-year-olds appear to have more fundamental difficulties with semantic processing of truth-functional negation (Reuter, Feiman, & Snedeker, 2018).…”

Section: /67mentioning

confidence: 99%

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

2020

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Section: /67mentioning

confidence: 99%

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

2020

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“…We tested children's interpretation of both known and unknown numbers using the "Don't Give-a-Number" task. Although it is unclear when English-speaking children begin to understand don't, recent work shows that they comprehend the words no, not, and didn't as markers of logical negation shortly after they turn two (Austin, Theakston, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2014;Feiman, Mody, Sanborn, & Carey, 2017;Reuter, Feiman, & Snedeker, 2018). Children at this age are typically non-knowers or 1-knowers, with many numbers still left to learn.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While previous studies have found that children as young as 2 years of age comprehend the logical meaning of words like no, not, and didn't (Austin, et al, 2014;Feiman, et al, 2017;Reuter, et al, 2018), these studies have focused on children's comprehension of negation in the service of exclusion inferences between one of two options. For example, given two options (e.g., a bucket and a truck), and told that a hidden ball is not in one of them, 2-year-olds search in the other.…”

Section: Negation and Entailment In Childhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrast and entailment: Abstract logical relations constrain how 2- and 3-year-old children interpret unknown numbers

2019

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Do children understand how different numbers are related before they associate them with specific cardinalities? We explored how children rely on two abstract relations -contrast and entailment -to reason about the meanings of 'unknown' number words. Previous studies argue that, because children give variable amounts when asked to give an unknown number, all unknown numbers begin with an existential meaning akin to some. In Experiment 1, we tested an alternative hypothesis, that because numbers belong to a scale of contrasting alternatives, children assign them a meaning distinct from some. In the "Don't Give-a-Number task", children were shown three kinds of fruit (apples, bananas, strawberries), and asked to not give either some or a number of one kind (e.g. Give everything, but not [some/five] bananas). While children tended to give zero bananas when asked to not give some, they gave positive amounts when asked to not give numbers. This suggests that contrast -plus knowledge of a number's membership in a count list -enables children to differentiate the meanings of unknown number words from the meaning of some. Experiment 2 tested whether children's interpretation of unknown numbers is further constrained by understanding numerical entailment relations -that if someone, e.g. has three, they thereby also have two, but if they do not have three, they also do not have four. On critical trials, children saw two characters with different quantities of fish, two apart (e.g. 2 vs. 4), and were asked about the number in-between -who either has or doesn't have, e.g. three. Children picked the larger quantity for the affirmative, and the smaller for the negative prompts even when all the numbers were unknown, suggesting that they understood that, whatever three means, a larger quantity is more likely to contain that many, and a smaller quantity is more likely not to. We conclude by discussing how contrast and entailment could help children scaffold their exact meanings of unknown number words.

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“…Different conclusions were drawn from the eyetracking study described by Reuter et al (2018). Reuter et al (2018) investigated processing of “didn’t” by 2- and 3-year-old children.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different conclusions were drawn from the eyetracking study described by Reuter et al (2018). Reuter et al (2018) investigated processing of “didn’t” by 2- and 3-year-old children. When Reuter et al provided children with both pragmatic (e.g., story contexts that created expectations for negation) and semantic (blocking of affirmative and negated trials) supports, even 2-year-olds showed above chance accuracy interpreting negation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grasping the Alternative: Reaching and Eyegaze Reveal Children’s Processing of Negation

et al. 2019

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There is evidence that children begin to understand negation early in the preschool years, but children’s processing of negation is not well understood. We examined children’s processing of denial negation using a variant of the visual world paradigm called the Shopping Task. In this task, participants help a puppet to find the items on a shopping list, selecting from two potential items on each trial in response to the puppet’s affirmative (“the next item is an apple”) or negation (“the next item is not an orange”) sentence. In this binary decision context, participants’ eye gaze and reaching behavior were tracked as they selected the item the puppet wants. Participants were 78 children aged 4–5 years and a comparison group of 30 adults. Results showed that children took longer to process negation than affirmative sentences, and that this difference arose early in processing. Further, children’s eye gaze behavior suggested that on negation trials they regularly looked first to the negated object and were considering the negated meaning early in processing. Adults did not take longer to process negation than affirmative sentences, but their eye gaze behavior also indicated early consideration of negated meanings for negation sentences. We also examined relationships between children’s language and executive function skills and their processing of negation and found no significant relationships. We conclude that both adults and children activate to-be-negated information in the processing of negation. Children, however, are less efficient at processing negation in this context.

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Getting to No: Pragmatic and Semantic Factors in Two‐ and Three‐Year‐Olds' Understanding of Negation

Cited by 33 publications

References 33 publications

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

Contrast and entailment: Abstract logical relations constrain how 2- and 3-year-old children interpret unknown numbers

Grasping the Alternative: Reaching and Eyegaze Reveal Children’s Processing of Negation

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