  `No' belongs to the first ten words used by children and embodies the first
active form of linguistic negation. Despite its early occurrence the details of
its acquisition process remain largely unknown. The circumstance that `no'
cannot be construed as a label for perceptible objects or events puts it
outside of the scope of most modern accounts of language acquisition. Moreover,
most symbol grounding architectures will struggle to ground the word due to its
non-referential character. In an experimental study involving the child-like
humanoid robot iCub that was designed to illuminate the acquisition process of
negation words, the robot is deployed in several rounds of speech-wise
unconstrained interaction with na\"ive participants acting as its language
teachers. The results corroborate the hypothesis that affect or volition plays
a pivotal role in the socially distributed acquisition process. Negation words
are prosodically salient within prohibitive utterances and negative intent
interpretations such that they can be easily isolated from the teacher's speech
signal. These words subsequently may be grounded in negative affective states.
However, observations of the nature of prohibitive acts and the temporal
relationships between its linguistic and extra-linguistic components raise
serious questions over the suitability of Hebbian-type algorithms for language
grounding.
