CNRS UMR5229 - Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, 67 Boulevard Pinel, 69675 Bron, France; Université Lyon 1, Claude Bernard, France.
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Pg. Lluis Companys, 23, 08019 Barcelona, Spain; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Roc Boronat, 138, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.
Cognition. 2021 Aug;213:104599. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104599. Epub 2021 Jan 29.
How do infants' thoughts compare to the thoughts adults express with language? In particular, can infants entertain negative representations, such as not red or not here? In four experiments, we used pupillometry to ask whether negative representations are possible without an external language. Eleven-month-olds were tested on their ability to detect and represent the abstract structure of sequences of syllables, defined by the relations identity and/or negation: AAAA (four identical syllables; Experiment 1), AAA¬A (three times the syllable A and one final syllable that is not A; Experiment 2), AA(A)(A)¬A (two-to-four times the syllable A and one final syllable that is not A; Experiment 3). Representing the structures in Experiments 2-3 requires a form of negation. Results suggest that infants are able to compute both identity and negation. More generally, these results lend credit to the hypothesis that the infant mind is equipped with rudimentary logical operators before language takes off.
婴儿的思维与成年人用语言表达的思维有何不同？特别是，婴儿能否想象出否定的表象，比如不是红色的或不在这儿？在四项实验中，我们使用瞳孔测量法来研究在没有外部语言的情况下是否可能存在否定表象。我们对十一个月大的婴儿进行了测试，以了解他们能否发现并表现出音节序列的抽象结构，这些序列由同一性和/或否定性关系定义：AAAA（四个相同的音节；实验 1）、AAA¬A（三个音节 A 和一个最后不是 A 的音节；实验 2）、AA(A)(A)¬A（两到四个音节 A 和一个最后不是 A 的音节；实验 3）。实验 2-3 中的结构表示需要否定的形式。结果表明，婴儿能够计算同一性和否定性。更一般地说，这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即在语言出现之前，婴儿的思维就已经具备了基本的逻辑运算符。
