“Look! It is not a bamoule!”: 18‐ and 24‐month‐olds can use negative sentences to constrain their interpretation of novel word meanings

Abstract

and the ANR 'Apprentissages' (ANR-13-APPR-0012). Data Availability StatementThe studies reported in this paper, including their entire methods, analysis and criteria for exclusion of participants, were pre-registered on the OSF (Open Science Framework) database before running the experiments. The formal preregistrations, the stimuli used, collected data, and data analysis, are freely available to readers through the following links: https://osf.io/hgjs6/ (for Exp 1) and https://osf.io/37uqa/ (for Exp 2).• This ability to understand negative sentences so early might support language acquisition, providing infants with a tool to understand the boundaries of a word's meaning.

Language as a mechanism for reasoning about possibilities

“…Interestingly, recent findings from more diverse experimental paradigms and speakers of languages other than English suggest that children may comprehend negative sentences at an even younger age. For instance, in a recent study using a word-learning eye-tracking paradigm, French-speaking children showed evidence of comprehending negative sentences at 18 months of age [49]. Although this earlier success is most likely due to the lower cognitive demands of the word-learning task (which did not involve logical reasoning but simply matching a sentence with the appropriate referent) rather than the different linguistic background of the children, it is possible that semantic differences in negation constructions across languages may affect acquisition trajectories (e.g.…”

The computational and the representational language-of-thought hypotheses

“…Children master the basic argument structure of English sentences between 12 and 15 months of age (Fisher, Jin, & Scott, 2019). For French and Hungarian, children have mastered the logical meanings of words for "not" and "no" at least by 17 or 18 months of age (e.g., de Carvalho, Crimon, Barrault, Trueswell, & Cristophe, 2021). So only children under 17 months of age can be safely considered prelinguistic with respect to propositional representations and negation.…”

The development of using function word “zài” to learn novel verbs in young Mandarin speakers

“…The results strongly supported the idea that young children can use syntax to limit the meanings of novel verbs. Since then, there has been a significant amount of research exploring this ongoing issue (de Carvalho et al, 2019(de Carvalho et al, , 2021Gertner et al, 2006;He & Lidz, 2017;Imai et al, 2005a;Kersten & Smith, 2002;Yuan & Fisher, 2006, 2009Yuan et al, 2012). Support for the hypothesis of syntactic bootstrapping in verb learning has been demonstrated across various languages and age ranges.…”