CAREER: LangDiv: How children learn the language of logical negation

Children need to learn the meanings of abstract logical words to express their own thinking and to understand the thinking that other people express. Unlike most early learned nouns and verbs, logical words such as “no” and “not” cannot be learned by observation because they do not refer to anything children can see or experience directly. Yet, the word “no” is one of the first words most children say.

However, how children learn this word and other words like it is not well understood. Discovering the answer to this question would reveal both the basic mechanisms by which children learn abstract words generally, as well as the childhood origins of the most foundational elements of critical thinking, reasoning, and logic. The broader impacts of this project include teaching and training in developmental and languages sciences for graduate and undergraduate students, and sharing of new language corpus resources created through this project with the broader scientific community.

This project aims to disentangle the difficulty of learning the concept of negation from learning the word (or words) that express the concept. Towards this goal, the project studies how infants and toddlers learn words for negation in English in comparison to other languages. These languages span a spectrum of how many different words are used to express related meanings such as rejection, prohibition, and absence.

For example, English expresses these meanings with “no”, whereas other languages use a different word for each of these meanings. This project tests the hypothesis that infants can grasp the concept of negation early in life, but the ease with which they can learn to express it depends on how many different, closely related words exist in the language they are learning by using language corpora and behavioral testing studies with infants and toddlers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.