Uninformative negation is infelicitous to both adults and children

Why do some negative sentences sound strange, even when they are both true and grammatical? Past work suggests that both adults (e.g., Clark & Chase, 1972) and children (e.g., Kim, 1985) find negation difficult, but context can facilitate the processing of negative sentences (e.g., Wason, 1965). We argue that the effect of context on negation is driven by general pragmatic principles rather than the conceptual difficulty of negation. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that more informative negative sentences elicited higher felicity ratings in adults. In Experiment 3, we showed that children are also sensitive to the contexts of true negative sentences, with threeand four-year-olds rating negative sentences higher in more informative contexts. We discuss the pragmatics of negation in light of these results, arguing that both adults’ and children’s difficulty processing negation is due to changes in the informativeness, and thus the felicity, of these sentences in different contexts. Contexts of negation 3