The Development of Negation in
Early Child Language
Roy D. Pea (1980)
The ways in which children acquire
language seems quite easy to
understand.
Language theorists still have difficulties
figuring out how children do this.
-i.e. how they construct meaning from words
in conversation that include actions, gestures,
and objects etc.
Empiricist account of child language
acquisition
Ostension theory
Words paired with objects provide the
child with referential connection needed
for language symbolization
- i.e. people substitute words for actions
(putting finger on lips means quiet down)
Problem with Ostension theory?
 Children use negatives in their first years of
word learning
 Negation cannot be referred to like nouns or
adjectives can (i.e. colours)
 Therefore, children cannot be taught
negation by ostension
Pea looks at the development of the
semantics of negation in the transition
from the pre-linguistic period to the
linguistic period of communication
among children.
Meanings of negation in sentences (Bloom,
1970)
 1) Non-existence: the referent was not
evident in the content where there was an
expectation of its existence and was negated
in child’s utterance or some gesture. E.g.
“Gone!”
 2) Rejection: the referent existed and was
rejected or opposed by the child.
e.g. “Do you want a cookie?”, “No.”
Denial: negative expression claimed that
an actual statement or other was not
the case. E.g. “Is this your toy?”, “No.”
With these meanings as a basis, Bloom
studied 3 American-English speaking
children and found that for each child,
the emergence of these 3 meanings of
negation first began with non-existence,
followed by rejection and then denial.
 Pea believes that the order in which the 3
negative meanings occur, while still important,
says little about how it is developed.
 While it is also important to look at the
meanings of negation in sentences, what needs
to be focused on is the meanings of negation
in the single-word utterance period.
 What is negation anyway?
 Has a number of meanings which are all much
alike
 Denials, refusals, prohibitions, and
statements of non-existence
i.e. “no” or “not” or “gone” are similar but can mean
different things
 Early verbal negation consists of a great
range of contexts in which negative words
occur individually.
 Problem is in trying to figure out in which
contexts children use negative words and how
they use them.
Table of the contexts of negative
utterances
Not a complete list
Shows diversity of situations
Some families have many features in
common
i.e. a child’s use of “no” to reject an object
along with a pushing away gesture is similar to
the child’s use of “no” in rejecting a
prohibition that constrains his/her action.
Pea expands on Bloom’s list of the
meanings of negation:
Rejection negatives: same as Bloom’s, child
rejects object, action or person etc.
Disappearance negatives: similar to
Bloom’s non-existence. Except: “unfulfilled
expectation is added. i.e. Search or play is
stopped because the child’s toy does not work
or something is not found.
Truth-functional negatives: The use of
negatives in response to a proposition (facts
of the situation that is true or false (similar
to Bloom’s denial).
Self-prohibition negatives: The child
approaches a previously forbidden object or
begins doing something that was not allowed
and then expresses and negative.
Pea uses these 5 semantic categories in
his longitudinal study.
 In order to convey these different meanings
of negation, children need some form of
cognitive representation i.e. symbolic or abstract
Rejection for example, expresses inner
attitudes toward behaviours, events or
objects etc. that are already present in the
child’s “early motor-affective” activities.
Therefore, there is no need for any cognitive
representation.
Disappearance negation on the other
hand, such as “gone” and “no more”
require abstract representation.
Object is no longer present
The child needs to somehow
acknowledge the object or event etc.
that has disappeared.
 Therefore, it may be obvious that rejection
negation is the first to emerge within a child’s
utterance of negatives, followed by
disappearance negation.
 Truth-functional negation also requires
cognitive representation, but with a far
greater complexity.
 Negatives with the meaning of not-x require
the use of abstract language by other people
and are therefore considered to be of a
higher logical order than disappearance
negation.
Longitudinal study done by Pea.
 Pea looked at 6 children from Oxford,
England who were acquiring English as their
first language.
 2 boys and 2 girls (HS, SR, CS, and JK) were
studied from 8 months old to 1 year and 8
months
 1 boy and 1 girl (RT and CB) were studied
from 1 year to 2 years old.
 Each child was visited individually in their
homes once a month for about 90 minutes and
videotaped for 30 minutes while playing,
feeding and other activities.
 Mothers were asked about their child’s uses
of negative words and gestures prior to the
study.
 Actions, pointing, gaze direction and objects
present were also looked at.
 The needed data for this study was based on
headshakes and verbal negations. i.e. single or
multiword utterances made up of at least 1
negative word or word occurring with a headshake.
 Negative words consisted of “no”, “not”, “n’t”
/na/ or /nƏ /, “gone”, “all gone”, “away”, “stop”.
Results
 All 6 children expressed rejection negation
first i.e. headshakes before any verbal
negation.
 RT: did not use negation until 1 year and 1
month.
–shook his head on 5 different occassions: 3 in
response to different questions such as “Do
you want ___?” where referent was visible,
once responding to a prohibition by his
mother and once to reject bicycle clips
offered to him.
 4 of the children first used a headshake to
reject food, diaper changing etc., and another
2 first used it in response to questions such
as “Do you want some milk?” or “Want to go to
bed?”
 Rejection was also found to be the first to be
expressed verbally.
 2 of the boys at the age of about 1 year and 8
months still had not used any verbal negation.
 These findings do not suggest that rejection
negation will be the first to be verbally
conveyed by every child.
 The order of the verbal expression of the
meanings of negation is not crucial
 What is crucial is the expression of the
negative meanings by gesture or speech etc.
 4 of the 6 children expressed negative comments of
disappearance with the word “gone” in contexts where
objects or someone had disappeared immediately
beforehand.
 1 month before the use of disappearance negation,
“gone” for these children was used when objects fell
out of their possession but stayed in sight and were
then picked up by the child afterwards.
 1 child still had not used “gone” for disappearance
negation before the study was over, but said “ga”
when blocks fell over or something fell out of his
hand.
 The development from “gone” in the present
to “gone” for objects not present suggests
that constraints in cognitive representation
delay the expression of disappearance
negation for objects etc. that are absent.
 Truth-functional negation was the last to
appear amongst 4 children (CB, CS, JK, and
RT) at ~2 years old.
Examples of Truth-functional negation
Unfulfilled expectation negation
 There is a constraint on the child’s activity or
something has stopped or does not work.
 May be expected to emerge before
disappearance negation.
 2 of the children (CS and JK) met this
expectation but 2 others (CB and RT) showed
unfulfilled expectation negatives prior to
disappearance negation.
 Reasons for this, according to Pea, could be
because of individual differences, the
invalidity of the stated differences between
disappearance negation and unfulfilled
expectation negation or an over generalized
definition of unfulfilled expectation.
 He leans toward the 3rd reason
 For all occasions where CB and RT conveyed
unfulfilled expectation negation (before
disappearance negation), they were in action
contexts.
 It being in action contexts, Pea believes that it
follows as a “primitive precursor” of existence or
location uses by the child.
 Existence and location negations of unfulfilled
expectation bring about knowledge within the child
about structure in the physical world and social
environment in the form of scripts, naturally
occurring sequences, activities, objects, events and
behaviours.
 These scripts etc. act as normative knowledge
so that when a child encounters differences
between them, he/she can account for these
differences by using negation.
Table showing topics of negation at highest
level of abstraction for 4 children using verbal
negation.
 Example of unfulfilled expectation negation:
CB at 22 months looked into Pea’s toy bag in
which for the previous 10 months always
found a ball she liked..
 She said: “ball, mummy”…her mother
answered: “I don’t know where it is” and CB
then replied with “no ball, mummy”
 The ball did not disappear, it just wasn’t
where she had expected it to be.
 Another example:
 CB found a teapot lid (usually on top of a teapot that was now
missing); she held up the lid and said “no teapot.”
 This shows that habitual norms for most children in the study like CB’s,
were peculiar to them but also very important.
 This is similar to adult situations in which adults also respond to things
out of the ordinary or expectations with negation.
 i.e. “There’s no milk left in the fridge.”
 Habitual locations of objects i.e. clothes and keys are important
in everyday life for adults as they are for children.
 Children’s negation is not similar to adults especially
in the first years of life.
 Topics, as Pea calls them, are not represented in the
same manner.
 He describes an example by Volterra and Antinucci
(1978): Child looks at hospital tower and says “Look,
there is no bell”
 Adults know that church towers have bells, not
hospital towers and are not surprised when it is not
there.
 In their view, the child aligns their representation of
the topic with the adult’s or listener’s. How???
 Through dialogue.
 In adult conversations involving negation, our
knowledge is usually misaligned with our listener’s
expectations
 If it were aligned, then there would be no use for
verbal negation
 E.g. A 16 month old says “gone” after a flame is blown
out from a match.
 What Volterra and Antinucci believe is that the child
negates the topic “the flame is present” which the
child infers the listener believes.
 However, Pea believes the problem with this
is that inferring the beliefs of the listener
isn’t always needed to verbally negate
something because children use negatives
without addressing some person i.e. when
objects disappear.
 Also, inferring the beliefs of the listener
requires a higher level of social cognition than
2 year olds can manage.
 Cognition alone is not enough to provide the
meanings of negation or the words children
use to express them.
 The meanings and forms of negation are
conveyed by older speakers of the language.
 Individual differences were shown to develop
over the longitudinal study based on the social
environment the children were raised in.
 Variations in word use to negation meaning
was also evident.
 Pea looked at topic initiation: Adult-initiated
negatives are those the child produces after a
preceding adult utterance. Self-initiated negatives
are those not adjacent to adult speech but are
spontaneously used.
 Findings for self vs. adult initiated negation: 40% of
the total negatives produced by 4 of the children
were initiated by the child.
 Therefore, the child made negative comments on
his/her own when objects disappeared, toys didn’t
work, things were found in unexpected places and
self-prohibition.
 Individual differences result due to variations.
 Example:
 CS’ mother was prohibitive and constraining. 20% of CS’ negatives
were self-initiated.
 37% expressed rejection
 26% expressed disappearance
 72% of JK’s negatives were produced spontaneously
 Mother encouraged independent play.
 58% were comments on disappearance
 7% expressed rejection
 40% of CB and RT’s negatives were self-initiated.
Consequence of these differences is the range of the different
meanings of negation.
The social environment for negation provided by the adults can also
affect the meanings of negation the child uses to express.
Interactionist Perspective

1.
2.
3.
The emergence of negation can be looked upon in 3
phases:
The child’s task is to find the meaning of negatives
in adult speech and to form a basis as to what “no”
and other negatives mean.
The child first uses negation and begins
generalizing negation to new situations.
The conversational environment supports the child
in expressing negation. The child then interacts
with others and is addressed by the listener.
 The predominant meaning of negation in the
1st year is prohibition from the parent. E.g.
“No!” and headshake.
 Parents will constrain and stop their child
from certain actions; some of which are
dangerous to the child i.e. sharp objects; and
some of which are valuable.
 Spitz (1957) looks at prohibition from the
parent as being the first meaning of “no” for
the child.
 He assumes that the child’s frustrated id
drives take in the negative words and
gestures and remember it by relating it to a
specific emotion experienced at that time.
 Hence why the child’s first use of negation is
for refusal or rejection. i.e. “no!”
 For their child’s safety, a parent may have to verbally
constrain and prohibit him/her from exploration.
 Spitz provides insights into the child’s formation of
the concept of negation as constraint:
 Parents first physically constrain their children
verbally then do it from a distance by language and
gesture.
 Within a month of physical constraints, the children
show signs of understanding “no” and the headshake
in that type of situation.
 Another sign they understand is when they
intentionally disobey.
 The child may also show displeasure by physical means
i.e. turning head to the side, pushing, throwing things
away from them, flailing arms.
 When communicating rejection, the ways in which
they were constrained by their parent earlier on is
reflected.
 When the parent uses verbal prohibition without
physical constraint, the child may first ignore the
prohibition by not understanding.
 By repetition, or louder voice etc., the child then
comes to understand.
 Spitz claims that prohibition rejection is the
first use of negation,
 However, Pea’s longitudinal study of negation
does not support this claim.
 A few children first used negation to reject
food, and others used it in response to
actions such as diaper changing or in response
to questions like “Do you want a drink?”
 Edwards (1978) suggests that an important source of
early word meanings for a child are the constraints an
adult imposes on a child’s actions by social prohibition
and those imposed by the physical world.
 He focuses on 3 areas of meaning: negation,
possession, and words (Adjectives and Verbs).
 He demonstrates the connection between
prohibitions, the child’s use of rejection negation and
possession
 i.e. “No, no touch,” “Mummy’s,” and “don’t” (self-prohibited
contexts)
 The child goes on to touch objects for
example, that were prohibited by the parent.
 The child denotes “ownership” verbally due to
previous situations in which others conveyed
the idea of “privileged access” to certain
objects.
 Example showing how social constraints are
basic to child’s idea of possession
A = child, S= mother, E=experimenter
 Therefore, constraints on actions according
to Edwards provide an early source of word
meaning.
 The child learns the sociocultural conventions
for negation use i.e. obeying negation
prohibition.
Conclusions
 According to Pea, constraint on a child’s actions is
represented internally by the child.
 “No” as a constraint provides the basis for the
conception of negation necessary for later use and
for the understanding of truth-functional negation.
 Child’s development in acquiring this negation depends
on social environment and cognitive representation.
 Constraints on a child’s behaviour provide what is
necessary for the development of negation.