The comprehension of Italian negation in Mandarin-Italian sequential bilingual children

This study investigates how sequential bilingual Mandarin-speaking children who had more than three years of exposure to Italian comprehended Italian negative sentences in comparison with affirmative ones. Sixteen bilingual children and 16 Italian monolingual peers were tested using a truth-value judgment task. All children showed greater difficulties in the comprehension of True negatives, indicating that the difficulties in the processing of negation, in the relevant experimental conditions, have a general validity across the two groups. This result can be readily interpreted in the light of the “experiential” theories of negation processing, by means of the two-step simulation hypothesis. In addition, it should be emphasized that bilingual children were more accurate in the comprehension of True negatives than monolingual children, a finding that deserves further investigation