Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Austria.
Cognition. 2025 Jan;254:105929. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105929. Epub 2024 Sep 13.
Young children acquire an amazing knowledge base, rapidly learning from, and even going beyond the observable evidence. They arrive at forming abstract concepts and generalizations and recruit logical operations. The question whether young infants can already rely on abstract logical operations, such as disjunction or negation, or whether these operations emerge gradually over development has recently become a central topic of interest. Here we target this question by focusing on infants' early understanding of negation. According to one view, negation comprehension is initially restricted to a narrow range of meanings (such as rejection or non-existence) and only much later infants develop a broader understanding that maps onto a fully-fledged negation concept. Alternatively, however, infants may rely on a fully-fledged negation concept from early on, but some forms of negation may pose more mapping and processing difficulties than others. Here we tested infants' understanding of two syntactically and semantically different forms of negation, existential negation and propositional denial in a language (Hungarian) that has a separate negative particle for each, and thus the two negation forms can be directly compared. We engaged 15- and 18-month-old infants in a search task where they had to find a toy in one out of two locations based on verbal utterances referring to the object at one of the locations involving existential negation (Nincsen - not.be.3SG) or propositional denial (Nem itt van - not here be.3SG). In Experiments 1-3 we found a parallel development for these two kinds of negation. 18-month-olds successfully comprehended both, while 15-month-olds were at chance for both. In Experiment 4 we excluded the possibility that 15-month-olds' chance performance is explained by task-related difficulties, as they succeeded in a similar, but nonverbal task. Thus, 15-month-olds likely still have not solved the mapping for the two negation forms. The parallel performance of the two age groups with the two negation types (failing or succeeding on both) is consistent with the hypothesis that different forms of negation rely on similar conceptual underpinnings already in early development.
幼儿获得了令人惊叹的知识基础，能够快速学习，甚至超越可观察到的证据。他们形成抽象概念和概括，并运用逻辑操作。幼儿是否已经能够依赖于抽象逻辑操作，如析取或否定，或者这些操作是否随着发展而逐渐出现，这个问题最近成为了一个关注的焦点。在这里，我们通过关注婴儿早期对否定的理解来解决这个问题。根据一种观点，否定理解最初仅限于一个狭窄的范围（如拒绝或不存在），只有在婴儿后期，他们才会发展出更广泛的理解，与一个成熟的否定概念相对应。然而，相反的观点是，婴儿可能从早期就依赖于一个成熟的否定概念，但否定的某些形式可能比其他形式更具映射和处理困难。在这里，我们在一种语言（匈牙利语）中测试了婴儿对两种句法和语义上不同的否定形式，存在否定和命题否定的理解，该语言有一个单独的否定词用于每一种否定形式，因此可以直接比较这两种否定形式。我们让 15 个月和 18 个月大的婴儿参与一个搜索任务，他们根据涉及一个位置的物体的口头陈述，在两个位置中的一个位置找到一个玩具，这个陈述涉及到存在否定（Nincsen - 不.be.3SG）或命题否定（Nem itt van - 不在这里 be.3SG）。在实验 1-3 中，我们发现这两种否定形式的发展是平行的。18 个月大的婴儿成功理解了这两种否定形式，而 15 个月大的婴儿对这两种否定形式的理解都只是随机的。在实验 4 中，我们排除了 15 个月大的婴儿的随机表现是由任务相关的困难解释的可能性，因为他们在一个类似的，但非语言任务中成功了。因此，15 个月大的婴儿可能还没有解决这两种否定形式的映射问题。两个年龄组在两种否定类型（在两种否定类型上都失败或成功）上的平行表现与这样的假设是一致的，即不同形式的否定在早期发展中已经依赖于相似的概念基础。
