Separating cognitive development from language development in the acquisition of negation using international adoption.

at the same point in vocabulary growth. Study 2 examined children's production of logical denial uses of negation words in longitudinal corpora of parent-child interactions. Adopted preschoolers' and language-matched infants' production of denials increased at the same rate relative to the mean length of children's utterances. Matching patterns of negation acquisition in internationally adopted preschoolers and first-language-learning infants support a solely linguistic, not conceptual, bottleneck on learning negation words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).