Mechanisms of scope resolution in child Italian

This paper presents the results of an experiment investigating children’s interpretation of the Italian indefinite qualche and negation in the two arguments of the universal quantifier. The findings show that Italianspeaking children’s interpretation of qualche in sentences containing negation is not limited to surface scope interpretations. The findings presented in the paper, together with the findings from English available in the literature, are used to evaluate alternative models of scope resolution in child language. A critique of the account offered by Musolino and Lidz (2006) is presented and an alternative account proposed by Hulsey et al. (2004) is reviewed.