Acquisition of noun phrases with kind reference in L3 Italian

Abstract

This dissertation examines the acquisition of noun phrases with kind and generic meanings in Italian as a third (or additional) language of adult formally instructed learners with prior knowledge of English and Spanish. This language triad presents an interesting two-way distinction in that Italian and Spanish behave alike on generic and existential subjects, while Italian is similar to English on number neutral (NN) objects. Patterns of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) from the L1 and L2 to the L3 are investigated, in order to establish whether CLI is driven by typological similarity or whether it happens in a complete or dynamic fashion. The former trajectory is predicted by the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) (Rothman et al., 2019); the latter––by the Scalpel Model ((SM) (Slabakova, 2017) and Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) (Westergaard, 2021a,b). For the TPM, early-stages CLI would originate from Spanish solely, easing the acquisition of subjects but hindering that of objects. For the SM and LPM, English could instead be beneficial on objects. Additionally, this research considers the roles of factors such as the high frequency of Italian definite phrases, expected to be beneficial, as well as language immersion, anticipated to have differential effects depending on structural similarities between the dominant prior language and the L3, in line with the SM predictions. The specific research questions probe how CLI manifests on L3 Italian generic nouns at the early and more advanced acquisition stages and how input frequency and language immersion impact acquisition. This dissertation is the first study to address the acquisition of generic nouns in L3/Ln Italian. It also constitutes the first research to investigate this pool of expressions with the same population.
The L3 learners were assessed on comprehension of Italian generics with an acceptability judgement task and an interpretation task, the latter being focused on the form–to–meaning direction. Additionally, oral use of generic nouns was tested with an elicited production task. Immersion scores in L2 English and Spanish and L3 Italian were calculated using the Language History Questionnaire (LHQ3) (Li, Zhang, Yu & Zhao, 2020), which provides aggregated measures of language usage and exposure on a cumulative and daily basis. C-Tests were deployed to assess L2 and L3 proficiency.
The trilingual participants were thirty L1 English–L2 Spanish–L3 Italian learners from England and thirty L1 Spanish–L2 English–L3 Italian learners from Spain, with L3 proficiency ranging from low to advanced. They were tested in the L2 and L3. The study also involved control groups of twenty-one Italian, ten English and ten Spanish native speakers. (Generalized) linear mixed effects models were used to analyse the participants’ mean ratings in the acceptability judgement task, and accuracy rates in the interpretation and production tasks. Measures of L2 and L3 immersion were obtained with paired-samples t-tests.
The results show successful acquisition of Italian generic nouns, as anticipated by the predictions of property-by-property CLI made by Slabakova and Westergaard’s models. Learners’ judgements of generic subjects were target-like, with some performative constraints observed in oral production. NN objects were also acquired overall, although L3 proficiency predicted performance. These findings indicate early-stages facilitative CLI from Spanish on subjects and English on objects, with the strength of CLI differing by property. However, a full mastery of existential subjects was not achieved, as judgments of acceptable forms were uncertain. A two-fold role of the input factor should be considered to explain these outcomes, together with linguistic transfer. On the one hand, the high frequency of the Italian definite article facilitated acquisition of generic subjects and NN objects, realised as definite phrases, over existential subjects, realized as indefinite phrases. On the other hand, the non-identical correspondence between structures across languages undermined the strength of facilitative CLI on objects and existential subjects, whose form–meaning associations are not very transparent. Whilst such outcomes are to some extent anticipated by Slabakova and Westergaard’s models, an evaluation of the structures’ degree of similarity could be also factored into the models. As regards language immersion, higher experience in the dominant background language structurally similar to Italian on a specific property was not always helpful, contrary to our expectations. The relative degree of learners’ L2 immersion may explain some individual differences.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Eleonora Boglioni: orcid.org/0000-0002-3165-5371

ORCID for Roumyana Slabakova: orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-460X

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