Developmental Trajectories of Verbal and Verbless Negation in Jordanian Arabic

Purpose. This study investigates the acquisition and variation of negation patterns among Jordanian Arabic-speaking children aged 3 to 9 years, addressing a critical gap in the psycholinguistic literature on Arabic language development. Methods. The data analyzed in this study were extracted from the Jordanian Arabic Child Language Corpus Project (Jarrah et al., 2025), which at the time contained approximately 150,000 words of transcribed spontaneous speech. Participants engaged in open-ended, semi-structured sessions designed to elicit naturalistic use of negation in daily conversational contexts. Results. Findings reveal that preverbal negation is acquired earliest and predominates across all age groups and dialects, with a pivotal developmental window identified between ages 6 and 8. The study’s results align with Usage-Based theories of language acquisition and the one-to-one mapping principle, demonstrating how children’s linguistic competence progressively converges toward adult norms through exposure and interaction. Furthermore, dialectal variation influences negation use, underscoring the interaction between cognitive maturation and sociolinguistic environment. Conclusion. This research provides a foundational psycholinguistic framework for understanding negation acquisition in a diglossic and socially stratified context, with implications for future cross-dialectal and longitudinal studies. The findings contribute significantly to the broader understanding of morphosyntactic development and language variation in Arabic-speaking populations.