Project NEPCO
The role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities in children’s negation processing
Children have difficulty understanding negation until around the age of five or six, and even adults process negative sentences less efficiently than affirmative ones. This project investigates whether these difficulties are related to the development of children’s cognitive abilities. To address this question, German-speaking children aged four to ten years and adult control participants will be tested using comprehension tasks, sentence-completion tasks, and eye-tracking experiments.
Children up to the age of five or six have difficulty understanding negation (e.g., This is not a dog), and even adults process negative sentences more effortfully than affirmative ones (e.g., This is a dog). This project investigates the extent to which the processing of negated sentences is related to cognitive abilities. It focuses on the roles of executive functions (EF) and Theory of Mind (ToM).
The project examines the extent to which EF are involved in simultaneously activating and controlling representations of actual and non-actual states of affairs, and whether ToM abilities support the understanding of speaker intentions and pragmatic inferences. Participants include monolingual German-speaking children aged four to ten years as well as adult control participants.
Two work packages employ a range of experimental methods, including production experiments, sentence continuation tasks, and eye-tracking measures. These methods capture both general processing costs and specific difficulties associated with the processing of negative sentences. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of the underlying causes of the particular challenges involved in processing negated sentences. The project is part of the Collaborative Research Centre Negation in Language and Beyond (NegLaB).
Cooperation
University Tübingen, project management: Prof. Dr. Barbara Kaup
Selected publications
- Capuano, F., & Kaup, B. (2024). Pragmatic reasoning in GPT models: Replication of a subtle negation effect. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 3953–3959).
- Kati, L., Sabinasz, D., Schöner, G., & Kaup, B. (2024). Interaction of polarity and truth value: A neural dynamic architecture of negation processing. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 1442–1448).
- Lago, A., Schulz, P., Rinke, E., Oltrogge, E., Dudschig, C., & Kaup, B. (2025). Insensitivity to truth-value in negated sentences: Does linear distance matter? In Proceedings of the 3rd Experiments in Linguistic Meaning Conference (ELM 3) (p. 214–223). Linguistic Society of America.
Funding
