C04

Project Overview

Studies indicate that children struggle to understand negation up to about age five or six, and that even adults find negative sentences harder to process than affirmative ones. This project argues that children’s difficulties with negation arise because key cognitive abilities needed for negation processing are still developing. The project examines the role of executive functions (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) in children’s negation processing.

Research Questions & Theoretical Framework

The research tests the idea that EF is needed to manage two opposing representations, the factual and non-factual states of affairs, and that ToM is required for fully understanding negation, including the pragmatic reasoning used to infer speaker intentions. The results will advance our understanding of how children and adults acquire and process negation and how cognitive procedures interact with negation. In later research phases, the proposed work plans to study adults with less developed ToM capacities and to extend the work to other syntactic structures (e.g., cleft sentences). Negative cleft sentences (e.g., It was John who did not eat the soup) are of particular interest because they apparently do not trigger a non-factual alternative. The project also plans to compare negation processing with other pragmatic phenomena that involve alternatives (e.g., focus particles) and to extend the studies to language production.

Methodologies & Data

The participants are German-speaking monolingual children aged 3;6–6;5 and adult controls. They will be tested in two work packages, focusing respectively on EF and ToM. We use several experimental paradigms: a production experiment where participants construct contexts for negated and affirmative sentences; a sentence-continuation task where they indicate how they interpret negative fragments; and eye-tracking paradigms targeting negation-related processing difficulty. This project will investigate general processing difficulty via pupil dilation (pupillometry) and more specific problems in constructing a factual representation during the processing of negative sentences (visual-world paradigm with a picture-matching task).