ON THE ORIGINS OF DENIAL NEGATION

These are the principal questions of this study: are the early functio ns of negation, such as REJECTION, and the later emerging DENIAL no de velopmentally related? And when do children start to deny? So far, evi dence for the questions at hand has been almost exclusively observatio nal. We decided on a simple elicitation procedure instead, asking 48 c hildren (ages between I ; I and 2 ; 7) easy yes/no-questions. The most likely age range for the appearance of denial no was I ; 8-2 ; I. Its error-free acquisition supports the continuity theory of negation dev elopment, which holds that essentials of denial no carry over from the earlier functions of no. Finally an attempt is made to account for th e beginnings of denial in terms of semantics and the representational theory of child cognition.