Babies Understand Negation Before the "No" Phase
One of the biggest challenges of language acquisition for babies is having to learn words and expressions referring to abstract concepts. Words related to absence such as nothing, zero, gone or no are special exemplars of this: as it follows from their meaning, we use them in the absence of those objects, events or conditions that they refer to, making them exceptionally difficult to grasp. Remarkably, however, babies manage to decipher the meaning of such words quite early: CEU researchers Eszter Szabó and Ágnes Kovács found that infants already understand verbal negation at one and a half years of age.