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.

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This entry overviews the pioneering experimental studies exploiting eye movement data to investigate language processing in real time. After examining how vision and language were found to be closely related, herein focus the discussion on the evolution of eye-tracking methodologies to investigate children’s language development. To conclude, herein provide some insights about the use of eye-tracking technology for research purposes, focusing on data collection and data analysis.

Language change can be conceptualized as a cyclical process of continuous renewal of the involved elements which somehow change their nature, with respect to phonological or lexico-grammatical features. A crucial aspect of such diachronic evolution is that cyclical change takes place systematically and follows regular and unidirectional patterns of development. Once the change is complete, the same developmental path will be undertaken by new linguistic items in the same cyclical fashion. In this paper, we illustrate the concept of cyclical change by discussing two examples of linguistic cycles. A first instance of cyclical development is displayed at the phonological level by the diachronic changes in the obstruent consonant system taking place from Indo-European to German through the First and the Second Sound Shift: the cycle is completed in the Cimbrian dialects. A second instance is provided by the diachronic process known as Jespersen’s cycle ([1917] 1966): sentential negation, initially expressed through a single negative marker, is later reinforced by an additional one; eventually, this second element becomes the only negative marker available in the sentence while the original marker is deleted. The discussion of the negative cycle takes also into consideration the results of an empirical research conducted on two varieties of an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in northern Italy.