On the origins of denial negation

Hummer, Peter; Wimmer, Heinz; Antes, Gertraud

doi:10.1017/s0305000900008503

Cited by 44 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Lyon, Carrick, et al (2008) showed that children as young as 2.5 years who failed to accurately label true and false (T/F) statements as “good” or “bad,” and “truth” or “lie,” nevertheless reliably rejected false statements and accepted true statements. This is consistent with research concerning children’s ability to reject counterfactual statements, a skill demonstrated in children as young as 20 months (Hummer, Wimmer, & Antes, 1993; Pea, 1982). …”

Section: Children’s Understanding Of Truth and Lies: Research And Legsupporting

confidence: 90%

Young children’s competency to take the oath: Effects of task, maltreatment, and age.

Lyon

Carrick

Quas

2010

Law and Human Behavior

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This study examined maltreated and non-maltreated children’s (N = 183) emerging understanding of “truth” and “lie,” terms about which they are quizzed to qualify as competent to testify. Four- to six-year-old children were asked to accept or reject true and false (T/F) statements, label T/F statements as the “truth” or “a lie,” label T/F statements as “good” or “bad,” and label “truth” and “lie” as “good” or “bad.” The youngest children were at ceiling in accepting/rejecting T/F statements. The labeling tasks revealed improvement with age and children performed similarly across the tasks. Most children were better able to evaluate “truth” than “lie.” Maltreated children exhibited somewhat different response patterns, suggesting greater sensitivity to the immorality of lying.

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Section: Children’s Understanding Of Truth and Lies: Research And Legsupporting

confidence: 90%

Young children’s competency to take the oath: Effects of task, maltreatment, and age.

Lyon

Carrick

Quas

2010

Law and Human Behavior

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“…Although these two lines of research have yielded considerable insight into children's emerging understanding not only of the truth and lies but also of a broad range of related concepts, including inaccuracy, mistakes, jokes, and pretense (Hummer, Wimmer, & Antes, 1993; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004; Siegal & Peterson, 1996, 1998; Sullivan, Winner, & Hopfield, 1995; Taylor, Lussier, & Maring, 2003), a basic question about children's conception of truthfulness and lying has gone unanswered—specifically, what role (if any) does the valence of the events about which children are questioned play in their early understanding?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does valence matter? Effects of negativity on children’s early understanding of the truth and lies

Wandrey

Quas

Lyon

2012

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Early deceptive behavior often involves acts of wrongdoings on the part of children. As a result, it has often been assumed, although not tested directly, that children are better at identifying lies about wrongdoing than lies about other activities. We tested this assumption in two studies. In Study 1, 67 3- to 5-year-olds viewed vignettes in which a character truthfully or falsely claimed to have committed a good or bad act. Children were biased to label claims that the character had committed a good act as the truth and claims that the character had committed a bad act as lies. In Study 2, 51 4- to 6-year-olds viewed vignettes in which characters either admitted or denied committing a good or bad act. Children were better at identifying truth-tellers and liars when the acts were good. Results suggest that young children initially overgeneralize the concept of lie to include all negative acts and the concept of the truth to include all good acts and only gradually make a distinction between act valence and honesty. As a result, including wrongdoing in scenarios to test children's early understanding of the meaning of lying is likely to underestimate children's abilities.

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“…Denial showed the opposite pattern—it was rarely produced during the early sessions (4%) and increased in frequency in the later sessions (23%). David thus exhibited the same developmental pattern with respect to negation as hearing children learning English from their hearing parents (Bloom, 1970; Hummer et al, 1993). …”

Section: Negativesmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Bloom (1970) found that hearing children learning English initially express nonexistence and rejection in their negative sentences and only later express denial (see also Hummer, Wimmer & Antes, 1993). To determine whether David displayed a similar developmental pattern, we examined how often David expressed the three types of negative meanings during his first four sessions (ages 2;10 to 3;03) and during the later four sessions (ages 3;05 to 3;10).…”

Section: Negativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negation, questions, and structure building in a homesign system

Franklin¹,

Giannakidou

Goldin‐Meadow

2011

Cognition

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Deaf children whose hearing losses are so severe that they cannot acquire spoken language, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use gestures called homesigns to communicate. Homesigns have been shown to contain many of the properties of natural languages. Here we ask whether homesign has structure building devices for negation and questions. We identify two meanings (negation, question) that correspond semantically to propositional functions, that is, to functions that apply to a sentence (whose semantic value is a proposition, φ) and yield another proposition that is more complex (¬φ for negation; ?φ for question). Combining φ with¬ or ? thus involves sentence modification. We propose that these negative and question functions are structure building operators, and we support this claim with data from an American homesigner. We show that: (a) each meaning is marked by a particular form in the child’s gesture system (side-to-side headshake for negation, manual flip for question); (b) the two markers occupy systematic, and different, positions at the periphery of the gesture sentences (headshake at the beginning, flip at the end); and (c) the flip is extended from questions to other uses associated with the wh-form (exclamatives, referential expressions of location) and thus functions like a category in natural languages. If what we see in homesign is a language creation process (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), and if negation and question formation involve sentential modification, then our analysis implies that homesign has at least this minimal sentential syntax. Our findings thus contribute to ongoing debates about properties that are fundamental to language and language learning.

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On the origins of denial negation

Cited by 44 publications

References 11 publications

Young children’s competency to take the oath: Effects of task, maltreatment, and age.

Young children’s competency to take the oath: Effects of task, maltreatment, and age.

Does valence matter? Effects of negativity on children’s early understanding of the truth and lies

Negation, questions, and structure building in a homesign system

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