Children learn to say or mean no early in their language development by using vocal and visual forms of expression. The first visual and vocal forms children produce are usually described as proto-negations as they do not completely resemble the forms in the input. In first language acquisition, most studies argue that proto-forms first emerge in children’s productions and slowly conventionalize into arbitrary signs (Clark, 1978; Guidetti, 2005; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005; Watson, 1924; Zlatev & Andrén, 2009). Children start with actions and vocalizations that are iconic (i.e. pushing an object away) and that slowly turn into conventional gestures and words and become communicative acts (i.e. headshakes, Vertical Palm gesture (Kendon, 2004)). The present study questions that assumption bringing together functionalist and constructivist theoretical perspectives (Tomasello, 2003), embodied interaction (Goodwin & LeBaron, 2011) and gesture studies (Kendon, 2004). The discourse of two monolingual French and English children from the Paris Corpus (Morgenstern & Parisse, 2012) was analyzed. Both children were filmed one hour per month from the age of 10 months to 4 years old in spontaneous and natural mother-child dyadic interactions. A negation was coded when the child or the mother expressed counter-expectations in relation with the immediate environment (i.e. expression of notions such as absence, incapacity, powerlessness or epistemic negation) or displayed negative stance towards others’ actions or speech (i.e. refusal, rejection, prohibition, protest, denial) using words, vocalizations, facial expressions, actions and/or gestures. Overall, 4337 negations were identified among which I analyzed 1172 multimodal negations with 537 occurrences in the English data and 635 in the French data. My analyses of the visual forms (actions and gestures) in the data do not entirely corroborate the assumption that there is a continuum between iconic and conventional visual forms. Some gestures are indeed acquired thanks to a process of conventionalization of body actions into gestures; but the data shows that some gestures are acquired straight from the input as is the case of palm-ups and head tilts. This shows that children may have direct access to conventionalized forms that are addressed to them in interaction. Iconicity may not always be a necessary step in children’s language development. Clark, E. V. (1978). From gesture to word. On the natural history of deixis in language acquisition. In J. S. Bruner & A. Garton (Éd.), Human growth and development (p. 340‑408). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C., & LeBaron, C. (2011). Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Guidetti, M. (2005). Yes or no? How young French children combine gestures and speech to agree and refuse. Journal of Child Language, 32(04), 911–924. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000905007038 Iverson, J. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture paves the way for language development. Psychological science, 16(5), 367–371. Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Morgenstern, A., & Parisse, C. (2012). The Paris Corpus. Journal of French Language Studies, 22(1), 7‑12. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing A Language: A Usage-Based Theory Of Language Acquisition (New edition, first edited in 2003). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviourism (W. W. Norton). New York. Zlatev, J., & Andrén, M. (2009). Stages and transitions in children’s semiotic development. Studies in language and cognition, 308‑401.