Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Bath, UK.
Cogn Psychol. 2023 Sep;145:101592. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2023.101592. Epub 2023 Aug 9.
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.
当学习者只接触到“是”时，他们如何学习“不”和“非”的含义？由于否定在逻辑和真理功能中的复杂性、抽象性和作用，它可能是一种概念上的成就。因此，儿童逐渐习得否定词可能是因为他们经历了一个必要的概念变化，以表示这些词的逻辑意义。然而，否定的语言表达也可能需要时间学习，因为儿童对语言的掌握逐渐增加。为了理解“不”和“非”的含义，儿童可能首先需要理解这些词在其中使用的其余句子。我们提供了实验证据，表明具备概念能力的学习者（成年人）在语言信息受到限制时，会面临与儿童相同的习得挑战，这模拟了儿童在不同习得阶段对语言的理解程度。当观看父母对孩子使用否定词的自然对话的静音视频时，成年人可以判断出父母是在禁止孩子，并努力推断出否定词是用来表达逻辑否定的。然而，当提供有关父母还说了什么的其他信息时，成年人很容易猜测父母表达了逻辑否定。尽管我们的发现并不排除年轻学习者也经历了概念变化，但它们表明，仅随着对语言的理解逐渐增加，而没有伴随的概念变化，就可以解释否定词的逐渐习得。
