Across the literature, it is claimed that adult speakers process negative sentences with more difficulties when compared to affirmative ones (Kaup et al. 2006; Dale & Duran 2011). However, most of these studies are based on experiments in which affirmative and negative sentences are presented in out-of-the-blue contexts. As a result, affirmative and negative sentences cannot be compared to each other because negative sentences tend to be more dependent on previous discourse than affirmative ones (Wason 1972). Crucially, studies with adults show that the difference in processing costs between affirmative and negative sentences disappears once negative sentences are preceded by an appropriate discourse context (Lüdtke & Kaup 2006).
It is usually claimed that linguistic structures that are processed with difficulty by adults tend to emerge late in language acquisition (Phillips & Ehrenhofer 2015). For example, the abovementioned difficulty of processing negative sentences is reflected in the observation that 4- and 5-year old children show poor performance in the processing and interpretation of negation (e.g., Wojtecka et al. 2013; Nordmeyer & Frank 2014). However, based on the abovementioned positive effect of discourse on the processing of negation, it is likely that children’s difficulties are related to the non-ecological nature of the adopted tasks, which do not include an appropriate discourse context (Reuter et al. 2018). To date, it is an open question if and how an appropriate context also facilitates the processing and interpretation of negation in children.
The aim of this project is to examine children’s interpretation (off-line comprehension), processing (on-line comprehension) and production of negation when negative sentences are embedded in an appropriate discourse context. Two scenarios are possible. On the one hand, a previous (appropriate) discourse may help children to comprehend and produce negation. If so, the difference in acquisition timing between affirmative and negative sentences should disappear once discourse is taken into account. On the other hand, children may have limited cognitive resources to enable integration of discourse information in comprehension, interpretation, and production. In this case, the difference in acquisition timing between affirmative and negative sentences should be attested under appropriate context conditions.
We will study the production, processing, and interpretation of truth-functional negation by 3-to-5-year-old German monolingual children, focusing on their sensitivity to discourse factors favouring the use and accurate interpretation of negation. We will use a sentence completion task, a speeded picture-matching task and an eye-tracking experiment to understand how far children integrate information at the sentence and discourse level and whether previous discourse allows children to build expectations for an upcoming affirmative or negative sentence. Our results will contribute to a better understanding of how negation interacts with discourse and, in general, how the presence of a truth-reversal operator interacts with other aspects of the grammatical system, in line with the Neg-Only Hypothesis. We will examine to what extent the occurrence of negation in specific contextual situations can foster its interpretation and processing in both adults and children.
This investigation will pave the way to the second and third phase of the project, in which we plan to analyse how children’s acquisition of negation in German interacts with the acquisition of other discourse-related phenomena (such as scrambling). Furthermore, we plan to extend our investigation to the acquisition of negation by bilingual children. Since bilinguals are known to integrate discourse into sentence interpretation in a different way as monolinguals, they represent a privileged viewpoint to test the (more or less) facilitative role of discourse in the processing of negation.
