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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 101592 |
| Journal | Cognitive Psychology |
| Volume | 145 |
| Early online date | 9 Aug 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2023 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This research was supported by a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation and the DARPA GAILA grant HR00111990064, awarded to R.F., and by the National Institute of Child. This research was supported by a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation and the DARPA GAILA grant HR00111990064, awarded to R.F. and by the National Institute of Child, Health and Human Development Grant P01HD40605 (to S.G.-M.). We thank the RAs that helped at various steps along the way: Sarah Fleming, Ebony Goldman, Jenna DiStefano at the University of Pennsylvania, and Allie Elkhadem, Haley Gibbs, Kristin Howell, Jennifer Hernandez-Pina, Naomi Lynch, and Max Mines at Brown University. Thanks also to Annika McDermott-Hinman for helpful comments and discussion. We would additionally like to thank Kristi Schonwald and the rest of the LDP team at UChicago for assistance in accessing and navigating the corpus in Experiment 1, and Asa, Erica Wojcik, and Jessica Sullivan for contributing to the SAYCam corpus, and for their generosity, advice, and assistance with respect to deploying it in Experiment 2. And, finally, we would like to thank Lila Gleitman, who helped us see the obstacles in learning by observation in the first place and provided insightful comments and incisive jokes throughout.
Keywords
- Conceptual development
- Human simulation paradigm
- Language acquisition
- Logical reasoning
- Negation
- Word learning
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Linguistics and Language
- Artificial Intelligence