Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.