It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation

Abstract

How do learners learn what no and not mean when they are only presented with what is? Given its complexity, abstractness, and roles in logic, truth-functional negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. As a result, young children’s gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a gradual conceptual change that is necessary to represent those words’ logical meaning. However, it’s also possible that linguistic expressions of negation take time to learn because of children’s gradually increasing grasp of their language. To understand what no and not mean, children might first need to understand the rest of the sentences in which those words are used. We provide experimental evidence that conceptually equipped learners (adults) face the same acquisition challenges that children do when their access to linguistic information is restricted, which simulates how much language children understand at different points in acquisition. When watching a silenced video of naturalistic uses of negators by parents speaking to their children, adults could tell when the parent was prohibiting the child and struggled with inferring that negators were used to express logical negation. However, when provided with additional information about what else the parent said, guessing that the parent had expressed logical negation became easy for adults. Though our findings do not rule out that young learners also undergo conceptual change, they show that increasing understanding of language alone, with no accompanying conceptual change, can account for the gradual acquisition of negation words.