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Part of
Language Acquisition in Romance Languages
Edited by Vicenç Torrens
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 18] 2024
► pp. 198–211

Chapter 8
“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

| University of Siena
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.
Keywords: negative concord, universal quantifiers, eye-tracking, Italian
Article outline
  • 0.Introduction
  • 1.A brief review of previous literature
  • 2.The study
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Method
    • 2.3Materials
    • 2.4Results
  • 3.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 July 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.18.08mos
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