'The More, the Better?' An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Sentential Negation in the Acquisition of Italian Nessuno

This paper presents an experiment on the comprehension of the negative indefinite pronoun nessuno (‘no one’) in different syntactic structures in Italian children aged 4 to 6. Specifically, the study aimed at determining when the meaning of nessuno is acquired, as well as whether negative concord structures showing both the sentential negation non (‘not’) and postverbal nessuno (e.g., ‘Non l’ha vinto nessuno’, lit. ‘Not it has won no one’) are easier to compute and, therefore, acquired earlier than structures displaying only preverbal nessuno (e.g., ‘Nessuno l’ha vinto’, lit. ‘No one it has won’) – a prediction following from a decomposition analysis of negative indefinites coupled with the Transparency Principle. Forty Italian-speaking children completed a Truth Value Judgement Task from which it emerged that the comprehension of nessuno is already almost at ceiling at 4 years of age, and that no difference in accuracy rates holds between pre- and postverbal nessuno. Although these findings neither support nor refute our predictions – that is, that the more linguistic material realised, the easier the comprehension – they are particularly interesting as they provide evidence for an early acquisition of nessuno regardless of the syntactic context. This, in turn, corroborates the idea that the late mastery of the double negation reading of certain Italian sentences featuring a preverbal negative indefinite followed by the sentential negative marker non is not to be attributed to difficulties in the processing of the negative information conveyed by the indefinite itself. Rather, it is more likely due to the processing of double negation requiring increased working memory resources and involving the detection and integration of both pragmatic and prosodic cues.