Given its complexity, abstractness, and central role in many logics, negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. Therefore, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a conceptual change that is necessary to represent logical meanings. However, it's also possible that expressing negation takes time because children are gradually getting a grasp of their language. To understand what no and not mean, children might first need to understand the rest of the sentences in which those words are used. We provide evidence that conceptually-equipped learners (adults) face the same acquisition challenges that children do when their access to linguistic information is restricted, which simulates how much language children understand at different points in acquisition. When watching a silenced video of parents using negators when speaking to their children, adults inferred when the parent was used negation to prohibit but struggled with logical negation. However, when provided with additional linguistic information, guessing that the parent had expressed logical negation became easy. Thus, previously noted patterns in negator learning can be explained as a result of information access (i.e., learning more about one's language). Despite the effect of language, the experiment suggests there is still a contribution of the context. As such, it becomes critical to determine what sorts of contexts are reliably likely to encourage "negative thoughts." Eliciting negators has been challenging and has often been assumed to require explicit contrast with affirmative alternatives. This would suggest that eliciting negators may require explicit contrast with an affirmative linguistic variant and therefore more contextual support. Yet, adults are known to naturally produce negation in null-discourse contexts ("It isn't raining!"), and learners obtain command of sentential negation fairly early (possibly by 18 months). Inspired by work on event perception, we explore the possibility that prediction failure in event perception is such a null-discourse context and provide evidence that this holds across development. Finally, connections are made to pre-linguistic research and it is argued that logical words face the same issues as non-logical words, and therefore nativist positions are warranted on the same grounds. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]