Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language acquisition research has shown that children aredelayed in their production and comprehension of truth-functional negation (e.g., “A raven is not a writing desk.”) ascompared to other kinds of negation (e.g., rejection and nonex-istence). The source of this delay is unclear, it may reflectdifficulty in mapping the concept of negation to the way itmanifests in their language, or it may be due to a lack of aconceptual or cognitive ability. This work aims to investigatethe circumstances under which a learner might infer the pres-ence of negation in a message, inspired by the approach ofPapafragou, Cassidy, and Gleitman (2007). Namely, we in-vestigate the degree to which videos in which agents fail incompleting an action encourages adult participants to infer theuse of negation in an utterance describing it. In addition toEvent Type (i.e., Failures vs. Successes), we provided par-ticipants with additional linguistic information (i.e., syntacticinformation via Jabberwocky sentences), lexical information(i.e., an alphabetical list of the content words), and Full Lin-guistic Context (the English sentence with a single item miss-ing). With adults, we ask whether learners with the ability toattend to goals and perceive deviations from their completioncould make use of this information, and if so, to what extentdo varying degrees of converging linguistic evidence furtherassist in inferring the use of a negator.