Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T02:47:26.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some facts one simply cannot deny*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Jill G. De Villiers  and
Helen B. Tager Flusberg
Jill G. De Villiers
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Social Relations, Harvard University
Helen B. Tager Flusberg
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Social Relations, Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two-, three-, and four-year-old children were tested on a variation of Wason's (1965) procedure for testing the effects of plausibility on the comprehension of negative statements. It was found that negatives about an exceptional item in an array, i.e. plausible negatives, were understood before implausible negatives. Reaction time data revealed that plausible negatives were also processed more rapidly for three- and four-year-olds. An additional effect on plausibility, namely the degree of confusability between the different items in an array, was proposed, and was found to become increasingly salient with age.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , November 1975 , pp. 279 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bellugi, U. (1967). The acquisition of negation. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Bloom, L. M. (1970). Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.Google Scholar
Carey, S. E. (1964). The syntactic and referential aspects of linguistic encoding. Honors thesis, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Donaldson, M. (1970). Developmental aspects of performance with negatives. In D'Arcais, G. B. Flores & Levelt, W. J. M. (eds), Advances in psycholinguistics. Amsterdam & London: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Greenfield, P. M., Smith, J. H. & Laufer, B. (1972). Communication and the beginnings of language: the development of semantic structure in one-word speech and beyond. Mimeo, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Klima, E. S. & Bellugi, U. (1966). Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In Lyons, J. & Wales, R. J. (eds), Psycholinguistics papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
McNeil, D. & McNeil, N. B. (1968). What does a child mean when he says ‘no’? In Zale, E. M. (ed.), Language and language behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1966). The acquisition of Russian as a native language. In Smith, F. & Miller, G. A (eds), The genesis of language. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.Google Scholar
Wason, P. C. (1965). The contexts of plausible denial. JVLVB 4. 7–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar