The role of context in young children’s comprehension of negation

• We conducted two experiments examining children’s comprehension of negation in two contexts.
• Children showed poorer comprehension when negative sentences referred to absence.
• Children also showed a tendency to look towards a negated named noun when negative sentences referred to an alternative.
• The results suggest that context influences children’s comprehension of negative sentences.

Negation is an important concept in human language, yet little is known about children’s ability to comprehend negative sentences. In this paper, we explore how 2–5-year-old children’s comprehension of negation changes depending on the context in which a negative sentence occurs. We collected eye-tracking data while children watched a video in which they heard positive and negative sentences. Negative sentences, such as “look at the boy with no apples,” referred to a boy with nothing (Experiment 1) or a boy with an alternative object (Experiment 2). All children showed greater difficulty in resolving the referent when negative sentences referred to the boy with nothing, despite suggestions that nonexistence negations of this type are produced early in development. In addition, 3- and 4-year-old children showed an initial tendency to look away from the target and towards the named noun when the referent of the negative utterance was an alternative object. We argue that the processing of negation in young children is influenced by the cognitive demands of the pragmatic context in which the negative utterance occurs.