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Why children prefer impossible worlds
No full textSentences with more than one logic operator are in principle ambiguous between different interpretations, depending on the assignment of LOGIC SCOPE This aspect, largely overlooked in previous studies, could provide the right distinction that we need to capture children's early misinterpretation of epistemic negative sentences. Grounded on the notion of semantic STRENGTH (Horn 1989), the opposition between weak (e.g. might not) and STRONG (e.g. cannot) meanings will be introduced, in order to motivate the empirical prediction that an asymmetry between different kinds of negative sentences should be observable in language development. This idea will be explored in two new experiments on Standard Italian, an ideal testing ground given its extremely simplified modal paradigm. The results confirm the prediction that, at age five, children do not have problems in comprehending negative epistemic sentences in general. Experiments 1 and 2 show instead that difficulties are largely confined to weak negative sentences. An additional result, found in Experiment 1, is the difference between children and adults in positive sentences. This result is accounted for in terms of focus and a related assertion of EXHAUSTIVITY. In Experiment 2, a contextual manipulation is introduced to test this hypothesis
The observation of superiority on multiple movements to the Italian left-periphery: Intervention effects on nested dependencies and the role of information-structure features
Get PDFYoung Romance speakers can structure their sentences by dislocating multiple constituents to the left periphery, resulting in non-canonical word orders. Production data, however, show that this ordering is rigid: only SOV sequences are attested, an observation reminiscent of Superiority. The first goal of the paper is to replicate this observation in comprehension; the second is to derive the Subject-over-Object pattern in terms of Intervention, with the additional assumption that only nested chains count as interveners. Three experiments are reported here. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 show that SOVs interpretations are systematically favored over OSV and that not only Number features, but also a [+Topic] feature help to overcome intervention. Experiment 3 addresses a potential confound related to the clitic. These results integrate existing intervention-based accounts, traditionally built on relatives, providing not only new evidence coming from matrix clauses, but also investigating the role of information-structure features
Discourse Adherence and the Pronominal Status of Null-objects in French-speaking children
No full textArguments, Adjuncts and Lexical Restrictions: Reaction-time Evidence for a Selective Intervention Effect in Wh-questions
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“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
No full textThe 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
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