Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children and animals successfully reason by elimination: if a reward is hidden in A or B, and they see A empty, theysearch in B (Call, 2004; Hill et al., 2012). Twenty-seven-month-olds also solve similar tasks when emptiness is conveyedverbally, through negation (The toy is not in the box, Feiman et al., 2017). However, it is unclear whether participantssolved these tasks with the disjunctive syllogism (A OR B, NOT A, THEREFORE B); in a 4-cup paradigm requiringdisjunctive reasoning only 3-5-year-olds but not 2.5-year-olds succeeded (Mody & Carey, 2016). We used a linguisticversion of the 4-cup task to examine childrens ability to reason disjunctively using verbal negation. We found that 3- and2.5-year-olds performed significantly above chance (58.1%, 54.2%, respectively, ps¡.05). Thus, presenting the negativepremise verbally facilitated 2.5-year-olds deductions. We conclude that older 2-year-olds have a robust understanding ofnegation, which they apply in abstract reasoning.