20-month-olds can use negative evidence while learning word meanings

Decades of research in psychology have built models and theoretical assumptions about language development evaluating how children extract information from positive evidence to learn the meanings of novel words. In the present set of studies, we evaluated whether children can also consider negative...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCognition Vol. 262; p. 106171
Main Authors de Carvalho, Alex, Dautriche, Isabelle
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.09.2025
Elsevier
Subjects
Cognitive science
Female
Humans
Infant
Language acquisition
Language Development
Learning - physiology
Lexical development
Linguistics
Male
Negation
Open data
Open materials
Preregistered
Psychology
Verbal Learning - physiology
Vocabulary
Word learning
Lexical development
Open materials
Negation
Preregistered
Word learning
Language acquisition
Open data
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Summary:Decades of research in psychology have built models and theoretical assumptions about language development evaluating how children extract information from positive evidence to learn the meanings of novel words. In the present set of studies, we evaluated whether children can also consider negative evidence, information about what a word cannot refer to. Across two experiments (n = 73), we show that English-learning 20-month-olds can use negative evidence in the form of negative sentences (e.g., “This is not a danu”) to constrain their interpretation of a novel word meaning (“danu”). These findings raise the possibility that learning word meanings through positive evidence alone, while possible, may not be the most accurate characterization of the word learning process and invite further developments of current word learning theories and models that incorporate negative evidence. •Developmental psychology assumed infants rely on positive evidence to learn words.•However, the role of negative evidence in this process was not investigated.•Here we show that infants use negative evidence to refine their word understanding.•This challenge traditional views about lexicon acquisition and refine existing models.•Opening new questions about the role of negative evidence in supporting learning.
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ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106171