The syntactic process of sentence negation allows us to change the truth conditions of a proposition encoded in a linguistic statement such as a sentence. It allows us to express non-existence, rejection and prohibition and enables us to evaluate the grammaticality of the sentence. The emergence of sentential negation is an important milestone in children's language acquisition, as the negative operator 'ne' is considered one of the more quickly acquired and most frequently expressed function words in children's speech, it also predicts the transition from a one-word period to a two-word period.
The head of the negative conjunction is represented by the negative operator 'ne' or 'ni', which negates the sentence itself and stands in front of its complement. Negative words (nobody, nothing, nowhere, never) are not semantically negative words and cannot negate a sentence by themselves, so they stand next to the negative operator and agree with it in negation, which applies to languages with strict negative agreement, which includes Slovenian. In order to check the occurrence of sentential negation, we can use (a) the genitive of negation test (the genitive case is grammatical, but the accusative case is not) or (b) the negative word test (if we are able to insert a negative word into the sentence, this confirms the presence of sentential negation).
We can express nine functions of sentential negation, which are difficult to distinguish from each other in children's speech. For this reason, the phenomenon of sentential negation is summarized into three major categories: (i) refusal or rejection, (ii) disappearance or non-existence or unfulfilled expectation and (iii) denial. The first category appears around the 12th, 13th or 15th month of age. Between the age of 13 and 24 months, the second category appears in children's speech, and the third when children are already able to create two mental representations (reality and false equivalent).
In this master's thesis, I tested the understanding of sentential negation in children aged 18 to 48 months. The 29 participants which were included in the research and statistical analysis of the obtained data were from Ravne na Koroškem. I found that the prerequisite for the acquisition of sentence negation is the acquisition of the concept of non-existence.
Considering the results of the picture-sentence matching test, acquisition of sentential negation is gradual and proportional to chronological and linguistic age. Children aged from 30 to 35 months are in a critical period for the acquisition of sentential negation, and it's usually already acquired in the period 42–48 months. An interesting note is that there is a very high statistically significant correlation between the success rate of solving affirmative and negative sentences. Given that a negative sentence is more complex than an affirmative one, I've concluded from this result that the understanding of affirmative and negative sentences is probably adopted earlier and that children's achievements on both types of sentences are strongly influenced by the structure of the picture-sentence matching task.
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