Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Abstract combinatorial thought supports adult human reasoning. But it is unknown whether such thought is available to infants who are in the process of acquiring their native language. In a series of three experiments, we ask whether 12-month-old pre-verbal infants have access to a propositional negation operator, as a defining hallmark of abstract combinatorial thought. We examine infants’ understanding of disjunctive reasoning problems, taking the insight that some impossible outcomes are supported by negation, while others may not be. We thus introduce a novel use of the Violation of Expectation paradigm, with visual stimuli which build on the Call (2004) cup task by expanding the range of possibilities and testing different kinds of inconsistent outcomes. Results from three experiments do not provide direct support for the view that infants possess a propositional negation operator, but they are more compatible with it than alternatives.