The ability to express negation is an important part of early lan-guage. Despite the fact that negation is a complex and abstractconcept, “No” is one of the first words that children produce.Past analyses have found that children’s early negations tendto express concepts like refusal (negations expressing that achild does not want to do something) rather than denial (nega-tions expressing that something is false). Does this mean thatyoung children are incapable of expressing denial? In Study1, we examine children’s spontaneous production of negationand find that some children produce denial negation earlier andmore frequently than past literature suggests. In Study 2, weexamine one possible explanation for individual variation inchildren’s negation production: differences in the joint activ-ities that they engage in with their caregivers. A comparisonof two children suggests that reading may be associated withthe production of denial negation. We discuss our data in lightof previous findings, and suggest that certain communicativecontexts are more likely to elicit different types of negation.

Negation is a complex, abstract concept, despite the ubiquityof words like “no” and “not” in even young children’s speech.One challenging aspect to words like “no” and “not” is thatthese words can serve many functions in speech, giving ustools to express an array of concepts such as denial, refusal,and nonexistence. Is there a single concept of “negation” thatunites these separate negative functions – and if so, doesunderstanding this concept require the structure of humanlanguage? In this paper we present a study demonstrating thatadults spontaneously identify a concept of negation in theabsence of explicit verbal instructions, even when theexemplars of negation are perceptually varied and representmany different functions of negation. Furthermore, tying upparticipants’ language ability using verbal shadowing impairsparticipants’ ability to identify a concept of negation, but doesnot impair participants’ ability to identify an equally complexcontrol concept (natural kinds). We discuss our findings inlight of theories regarding the representation of negation andthe relationship between language and thought.

Why do some negative sentences sound strange, even when they are both true and grammatical? We explore the pragmatics of negation by examining adults’ explicit felicity judgments of negative sentences in context. In Experiment 1, we found that a pragmatically supportive context elicited higher felicity ratings for negative sentences, and that negative sentences expressing nonexistence were rated higher than negative sentences referring to an alternative object. In Experiment 2, we used a within-subjects design to compare three context types, and found that negative sentences were rated more felicitous in a context where most of the characters possessed the negated object, compared to contexts where the other characters possessed an alternative object or nothing. We discuss the pragmatics of negation in light of these results, arguing that the felicity of negative sentences is influenced by changes in the informativeness of these sentences in different contexts

Despite their considerable communicative abilities, youngchildren often have difficulty interpreting complex linguisticstructures in context. Two examples of this phenomenon arenegation and pragmatic implicature, both of which pose some-times surprising difficulties for preschoolers. Both of thesestructures require children to resist a more salient alternativeinterpretation; since executive function abilities develop ex-tensively during childhood, perhaps failures are due to prob-lems in inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we designed tasksto measure inhibitory control, negation, and implicature com-prehension in children and adults. Using standard analyses aswell as drift diffusion models, we found different patterns ofprocessing on all three tasks, and no support for the hypothesisthat inhibitory control per se is playing a role in either adults’or children’s negation or implicature processing. Instead, ouranalyses reveal qualitatively different developmental trajecto-ries, suggesting task-specific factors driving these changes.