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.
How do young children encode absence and arrive to map different forms of negation like ‘There are no more cookies’, ‘This not my bunny’ or ‘Ghosts do not exist’ to the respective concepts? According to one view, negation comprehension is initially restricted to a narrow range of meanings (such as rejection or non-existence) and infants develop a broader understanding that maps onto a fully-fledged negation concept much later. 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. Understanding propositional denial, for example – negating something in relation to an existing entity, such as saying ‘it’s not here’, ‘this bike is not ours’, ‘we shouldn’t go by car’ - might be more complex and could emerge later than existential negation. Developmental scientists Eszter Szabó and Ágnes Kovács investigated whether babies indeed process this form of negation at a later age than verbal expressions of existential negation.
The scientists engaged 15- and 18-month-old babies in a simple search task: to find a toy named Bobo in one of two cups. An adult gave hints to the infants to help them find Bobo: looking in one of the cups, she either showed the babies that the cup is empty, or she told them that Bobo is not there. The study was conducted in Hungarian, a language with separate negative particles for different forms of negation. In the verbal versions of the task, the adult either used the Hungarian verb nincsen which means (it) is not and expresses the absence of entities (existential negation), or she said nem itt van, meaning (it) is not here (propositional denial). The researchers tracked where the babies first looked for the hidden toy.
Both negative expressions sufficiently helped 18-month-olds to find Bobo in the correct location on their first try. 15-month-olds, however, only succeeded in the nonverbal version of the task: if they saw that one of the cups was empty, they drew the right conclusion and avoided this location, but if the same information was conveyed verbally, they were equally likely to search in both cups, irrespective of the type of negation they heard. These results suggest that the understanding of these two negation forms develops in parallel, consistent with the hypothesis that they rely on similar conceptual underpinnings already in early development.
Original paper: Szabó, E., & Kovács, Á.-M. (2025). Do early meanings of negation map onto a fully-fledged negation concept in infancy? Cognition, 254, 105929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105929
