The Acquisition of Negation in Italian

Abstract

The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying proportion of use and (c) the emergence of negative concord constructions. Using the CHILDES database, the longitudinal data of four monolingual Italian children for an observation period from 1;07 to 3;04 years of age were extracted, and the negative utterances attested in their speech production were analyzed for both the single- and the multiword utterance period. Results show a consistent and progressive form–function development of negation, mainly in line with previous cross-linguistic literature but with some language-related features. Minor differences across children are also attested, which are arguably related to their language development, as measured by their mean length of utterance (MLU) in the age intervals considered.

Keywords

• language acquisition
• negation
• Child Italian