The paper presents novel findings on young children’s processing of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in Italian in preverbal position. This is a syntactic environment in which their interpretation is equivalent to the English Negative pronouns “Nobody/Nothing”. Eye movements show that by the age of 5 children have little troubles in accessing the correct interpretation of preverbal NCIs. However, their processing time lags behind positive universal quantifiers used as controls. This result is discussed in relation to a documented overgeneralization of Negative Concord in early grammars.

Moscati, V. (2024). “Nobody” isn’t in time: on-line processing of Negative Concord Items in Italian and its implications for the delay of double negation readings in young children. In V. Torrens (a cura di), Language acquisition in Romance languages (pp. 189-211). Amsterdam : John Benjamins [10.1075/bpa.18.08mos].

“Nobody” isn’t in time: on-line processing of Negative Concord Items in Italian and its implications for the delay of double negation readings in young children

Moscati, Vincenzo
2024-01-01

Abstract

The paper presents novel findings on young children’s processing of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in Italian in preverbal position. This is a syntactic environment in which their interpretation is equivalent to the English Negative pronouns “Nobody/Nothing”. Eye movements show that by the age of 5 children have little troubles in accessing the correct interpretation of preverbal NCIs. However, their processing time lags behind positive universal quantifiers used as controls. This result is discussed in relation to a documented overgeneralization of Negative Concord in early grammars.
2024
9789027214799
Moscati, V. (2024). “Nobody” isn’t in time: on-line processing of Negative Concord Items in Italian and its implications for the delay of double negation readings in young children. In V. Torrens (a cura di), Language acquisition in Romance languages (pp. 189-211). Amsterdam : John Benjamins [10.1075/bpa.18.08mos].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11365/1273854