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Do early meanings of negation map onto a fully-fledged negation concept in infancy?
No full textYoung children acquire an amazing knowledge base, rapidly learning from, and even going beyond the observable evidence. They arrive at forming abstract concepts and generalizations and recruit logical operations. The question whether young infants can already rely on abstract logical operations, such as disjunction or negation, or whether these operations emerge gradually over development has recently become a central topic of interest. Here we target this question by focusing on infants' early understanding of negation. According to one view, negation comprehension is initially restricted to a narrow range of meanings (such as rejection or non-existence) and only much later infants develop a broader understanding that maps onto a fully-fledged negation concept. Alternatively, however, infants may rely on a fully-fledged negation concept from early on, but some forms of negation may pose more mapping and processing difficulties than others. Here we tested infants' understanding of two syntactically and semantically different forms of negation, existential negation and propositional denial in a language (Hungarian) that has a separate negative particle for each, and thus the two negation forms can be directly compared. We engaged 15- and 18-month-old infants in a search task where they had to find a toy in one out of two locations based on verbal utterances referring to the object at one of the locations involving existential negation (Nincsen - not.be.3SG) or propositional denial (Nem itt van - not here be.3SG). In Experiments 1–3 we found a parallel development for these two kinds of negation. 18-month-olds successfully comprehended both, while 15-month-olds were at chance for both. In Experiment 4 we excluded the possibility that 15-month-olds' chance performance is explained by task-related difficulties, as they succeeded in a similar, but nonverbal task. Thus, 15-month-olds likely still have not solved the mapping for the two negation forms. The parallel performance of the two age groups with the two negation types (failing or succeeding on both) is consistent with the hypothesis that different forms of negation rely on similar conceptual underpinnings already in early development
The random cascading origin of abrupt transitions in interdependent systems
No full textPhase transitions are fundamental features of statistical physics. While the well-studied continuous phase transitions are known to be controlled by external global changes affecting the order parameter, the origin of abrupt transitions is not fully clear. Here we show that abrupt phase transitions may occur due to a unique internal random spatial cascading mechanism, arising from dependency interactions. We experimentally unveil the underlying mechanism of the abrupt transition in interdependent superconducting networks to be governed by a unique metastable state of a long-living resistance cascading plateau. This plateau is characterized by spontaneous cascading events that occur at random locations and last for thousands of seconds, followed by a sudden global phase shift of the system. The plateau time length changes with the system size and distance from criticality, obeying scaling laws with critical exponents. Furthermore, like epidemic spreading, these changes are characterized by a branching factor which equals exactly one at the critical point and deviates from one off criticality. Importantly, the branching factor provides an early warning for the closeness of critical catastrophic cascades yielding system collapse
Multilingualism in Eurasian Premodern Societies – Introductory Remarks
No full textThis introductory essay outlines the aims, scope, and initial results of the work package Multilingualism in Eurasian Premodern Societies: Social Hierarchies and Spaces, part of the Cluster of Excellence »Eurasian Transformations«. The work package investigates multilingualism as a pervasive feature of premodern Eurasian societies and explores how language use intersected with social diversity, identity formation, and spatial organisation. By combining social, spatial, and linguistic approaches, the initiative seeks to illuminate the functional and ideological dimensions of historical multilingualism and to situate it within broader patterns of communication, mobility, and power. Since the 1990s, scholarship has recognised multilingualism not as an exception but as a structural norm of premodern polities. Building on this foundation, the work package examines multilingual practices in key urban settings – administrative, religious, and commercial – where social hierarchies were negotiated and reproduced. A series of workshops and a major conference held in Vienna between 2025 and 2026 addressed administrative multilingualism, elite linguistic repertoires, religious language spaces, and the linguistic dynamics of trade. These events highlighted how languages served as instruments of governance, social distinction, and economic interaction, and how multilingual practices were embedded in the spatial logic of cities and empires. The contributions by Marijana Mišević and Lena Sadovski exemplify the project’s approach. Mišević analyses Ottoman–Ragusan multilingual diplomatic communication and the shifting role of Slavic expertise in early Ottoman administration, while Sadovski investigates the pragmatic coexistence of Latin, Venetian, and Slavic in late medieval Spalato, emphasising the social distribution of language skills and the significance of vernacular communication. Together, these studies open up new comparative perspectives on multilingualism in premodern Eurasia and lay the groundwork for further interdisciplinary research within the Cluster of Excellence