The Acquisition of Antonymous Dimensional Adjectives by Italian Preschoolers

Antonymy is a lexical-semantic relation of opposition which plays a central role in the organization of the mental lexicon and discourse (Cruse 1988; Dees 1962; 1964; Jones 2002; Paradis and Willners, a.o.). Antonymic pairs like long/short comprise a positive member, long, and a negative one, short. Previous findings on the acquisition of antonyms are mixed: some results have shown that negative antonyms are mastered later than their positive poles (Donaldson and Wales 1970; Ehri 1976; Klatzky et al. 1973, Palermo 1974, a.o.); but others have reported that both antonymic members are comprehended as having opposite meaning from very early on (Carey 1978; Gathercole 1979; Phillips and Pexman 2015; Wannemacher and Ryan 1978). Our work contributes to previous research on the asymmetry between positive and negative antonymic terms, by investigating whether polarity affects the comprehension of antonymic adjectives and how children’s comprehension develops through age. We focus on Italian, a language on which very little research has been devoted to antonymy. Sixty-nine Italian-speaking children (age 3-5 yo) and 20 adults were tested by means of a card selection task on the interpretation of three antonymous pairs of dimensional adjectives modifying 12 novel nouns: alto/basso ‘tall/little’, lungo/corto ‘long/short’, grande/piccolo ‘big/small’. Our results suggest the positive/negative distinction affects children’s comprehension: at age 4, children are already adult-like in the interpretation of the positive adjectives, whereas they lag behind with the negative terms.