The early steps of modal and negation interactions

Children’s interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences has been the subject of much recent research. In this paper, we address this issue by looking at children’s interpretation of sentences containing an ambiguity between different scope-bearing elements, namely negation and a modal verb in Italian. We present experimental results suggesting that Italian-speaking children differ from Italian-speaking adults in that they choose strong inverse scope interpretations rather than weak surface scope interpretations.