Italian L2 Research Articles

Explicit information, working memory, and cognitive control in processing instruction

This exploratory study examines the how individual differences in working memory and cognitive control relate to processing instruction (PI) targeting word order and accusative clitic pronouns in L2 Italian. Intermediate learners of Italian (N = 32) completed 50 structured input items, in which they heard a sentence beginning with either a preverbal accusative clitic pronoun or a subject/agent and matched what they heard with one of two pictures. Half of the participants received explicit information about the target structure prior to the treatment; the other half did not. In addition, all participants completed a test of working memory (operation span task) and a test of inhibitory control (AX-CPT). The results revealed different relationships between cognitive measures (working memory, cognitive control) and structured input task performance depending on whether learners received explicit information prior to the treatment. The findings suggest that individual differences in these resources may have more to do with how learners utilize them in different ways and at different times depending on the availability of explicit information. However, PI is still an effective treatment for learners of varying degrees of working memory and cognitive control regardless of the presence explicit information.

Un modello di presentazione delle preposizioni italiane esprimenti causa e dei casi serbi nel materiale didattico

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for a didactic representation of Italian prepositions and their Serbian equivalents that could facilitate 1. the comprehension and acquisition of Italian prepositions by Serbian learners of L2 Italian, and 2. possibly also the comprehension and acquisition of Serbian cases by Italian learners of L2 Serbian. Italian prepositional constructions and Serbian morphological cases may express the same syntactic and semantic functions. Taken separately, both Italian prepositions and Serbian cases have been studied in great detail and in depth, not only from the point of view of inflectional morphology, but also from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, the functions that these categories perform in the two languages have to date been compared only sporadically and in very general terms, without any attempts of a systematic and exhaustive contrastive analysis. Additionally, the authors of didactic materials intended for Serbian speakers learning Italian, as well as Italian speakers learning Serbian as an L2, often do not pay sufficient attention to a contrastive representation of Italian prepositions and Serbian cases. For this reason, they still represent one of the most frequent error types during the process of acquisition of the languages in question. Therefore, this paper compares the Italian prepositional constructions consisting of simple prepositions followed by nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs on one side, and their Serbian equivalents on the other side, by means of contrastive analysis methods. The results of our analysis could be applied in the creation of grammars, dictionaries, textbooks, and additional didactic materials for L2 Italian for Serbian learners and for L2 Serbian for Italian learners.

Linguistic Profile of a Text and Human Ratings of Writing Quality: a Case Study on Italian L1 Learner Essays

This paper presents a study based on the linguistic profiling methodology to explore the relationship between the linguistic structure of a text and how it is perceived in terms of writing quality by humans. The approach is tested on a selection of Italian L1 learners essays, which were taken from a larger longitudinal corpus of essays written by Italian L1 students enrolled in the first and second year of lower secondary school. Human ratings of writing quality by Italian native speakers were collected through a crowdsourcing task, in which annotators were asked to read pairs of essays and rated which one they believed to be better written. By analyzing these ratings, the study identifies a variety of linguistic phenomena spanning across distinct levels of linguistic description that distinguish the essays considered as ‘winners’ and evaluates the impact of students’ errors on the human perception of writing quality.

KIU (Kiswahili–Italiano-UniOr): The UniOr online Dictionary for Italian L1 Swahili Learners

KIU is an online bilingual Swahili–Italian dictionary with about 6000 entries aimed primarily at Italian L1 Swahili learners and which has been developed at the University of Naples 'L'Orientale'. The project was started in 2003 by M. Toscano and developed with the collaboration of lan­guage experts and young researchers until 2009 with the aim of offering online lexical resources from Swahili to Italian for learners of the language. After a long interruption, the work was resumed in 2019 by the authors of this article in cooperation with M. Toscano and a team of expert IT technicians. The current work consists of the development ex novo of the dictionary software, which had become obsolete, along with a redesign of some lexicographic features. In this report we will show how the upgraded version of the dictionary software has been implemented, with relevant learner-oriented features, by taking into consideration the standard lexicographic characteristics of Swahili–Italian bilingual dictionaries. This dictionary represents a valuable support for L2 learners and is the only on-line Swahili–Italian dictionary expressly built for university students and Italian users at large. Keywords: Swahili, Italian, online dictionary, learners, lexicography

On Robustness and Sensitivity of a Neural Language Model: A Case Study on Italian L1 Learner Errors

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive linguistic study aimed at assessing the implicit behavior of one of the most prominent Neural Language Models (NLM) based on Transformer architectures, BERT Devlin et al., when dealing with a particular source of noisy data, namely essays written by L1 Italian learners containing a variety of errors targeting grammar, orthography and lexicon. Differently from previous works, we focus on the pre-training stage and we devise two complementary evaluation tasks aimed at assessing the impact of errors on sentence-level inner representations in terms of semantic robustness and linguistic sensitivity. While the first evaluation perspective is meant to probe the model's ability to encode the semantic similarity between sentences also in the presence of errors, the second type of probing task evaluates the influence of errors on BERT's implicit knowledge of a set of raw and morpho-syntactic properties of a sentence. Our experiments show that BERT's ability to compute sentence similarity and to correctly encode multi-leveled linguistic information of a sentence are differently modulated by the category of errors and that the error hierarchies in terms of robustness and sensitivity change across layer-wise representations.

Intonation Patterns Used in Non-Neutral Statements by Czech Learners of Italian and Spanish: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

The objective of the study is to contribute to our understanding of the acquisition of second language intonation by comparing L2 Italian and L2 Spanish as produced by L1 Czech learners. Framed within the L2 Intonation Learning theory, the study sheds light on which tonal events tend to be successfully learnt and why. The study examines different types of non-neutral statements (narrow focus, statements of the obvious, what-exclamatives), obtained by means of a Discourse Completion Task. The findings show that the two groups diverge significantly in producing the nuclear pitch accents L+H* (L2 Spanish) and (L+)H*+L (L2 Italian), which is indicative of a target-like realization in each language. However, the learners struggle with the acquisition of the target boundary tones HL% and L!H% in L2 Spanish and prenuclear pitch accents in both Romance varieties. It is speculated that this is due not only to difficulties in acquiring semantic or systemic dimensions, but also to perceptual salience and frequency effects. In addition, the study explores individual differences and reveals no significant effects of the time spent in an L2-speaking country, the age of learning and the amount of active use of a foreign language on accuracy in L2 production.

A Multidimensional Understanding of Italian L2 Learner Motivation among University Students in a Predominantly English-Speaking Environment

AbstractStudies on motivation in learning Italian in Australia have mostly shed light on students’ creation of an ideal Italian self (e.g., Caruso and Fraschini). In doing so, they appear mainly to explore students’ psychological reactions to the Italian learning process. Our study aims to complement previous research through the use of a three-level model (D'Orazzi, Motivation) that incorporates the analysis of psychological and cognitive components at the micro level, pedagogical dynamics at the meso level, and social context at the macro level. While taking a strongly quantitative approach, its results also build on and potentially contrast with those of a recent qualitative study undertaken by D'Orazzi and Hajek on university students’ motivation when learning Italian in an English-speaking country such as Australia. In this article, we analyze survey data collected among students of Italian enrolled at a selection of Australian universities. Two online questionnaires were sent to students who answered fifty-one Likert scale questions addressing their learning experience as beginner students over one year of Italian studies. Our results point to the multidimensional and dynamic nature of second language learning motivation over time (Oakes and Howard), also following Danesi's argument that pedagogical factors need to be considered in studies on L2 learning motivation.

The Acquisition of Italian Stops by Igbo Speakers

This research explored the acquisition of Italian singleton stops by Igbo speakers. The voiceless and voiced stop phonemes /p t k/ and /b d g/ are present in both Italian and in the Igbo languages. This creates a perfect condition to check the learning strategies implemented in Italian L2. The theoretical framework taken up in this study was the Speech Learning Model. According to this approach, the sounds of L2 can be perceived by learners as the same, similar or as new compared to those present in their L1, depending on the greater or lesser acoustic and perceptive distance established between them. A spectro-acoustic analysis achieved on the stops produced by Igbo learners of Italian showed the presence of sound categories with a different acoustic structure. In Italian L2 stops have undergone an important phonetic adaptation that makes them perceptually different from what is achieved by native Italians.

Motion event construal in L2 French and Italian: from acquisitional perspectives to pedagogical implications

AbstractThis study explores motion event construal in a story-telling task produced by learners of L2 French and Italian (intermediate vs advanced), whose L1 is typologically close to (Italian or French) or distant (English) from the TL. English, characteristically classified as S-language, contrasts with Italian and French, both typically considered as V-languages. Nevertheless, Italian is more satellite-framed than French. We examine (a) the extent to which learners get closer to the target preferences in coding motion, (b) the role of cross-linguistic influence, (c) the implications of our typological and acquisitional results in the language class. The findings show that L2 intermediate productions are similar across L1s’ (no specific L1 effect in L2), whereas cross-linguistic influence is evident at the advanced level when SL-TL have analogous formal structures (verb-particle constructions). L1 Romance learners look for similarities in the L2 rather than for L2-specific alternatives, despite the partial proximity between French and Italian.

Practices of inclusion/exclusion in and through classroom dialogue

AbstractThe paper explores non-native children’s peer socialization to norms of literacy and appropriate language use in the classroom. Drawing on ethnographic research in a primary school in northern Italy, this study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyze an Italian L2 class attended by children aged 8 to 10. The study focuses on children’s enacting of correction sequences following peers’ problematic conduct. As the analysis illustrates, children creatively re-produce teachers’ ways of speaking to enforce normative uses of language. Through these practices, non-native children socialize their classmates into expected ways of speaking, reading, and writing, and negotiate the social hierarchy of the peer group. Risks and opportunities of such practices are considered in relation to children’s social inclusion and exclusion.

Non-optimal processing of auxiliaries in L2 Italian: An eye-movement and acceptability judgment study

Abstract We investigated whether 68 non-native, tutored beginning L2 learners of Italian – with alphabetical and non-alphabetical L1s – discriminated between sentences containing target-like and non-target-like auxiliaries. We questioned whether learners’ choices could be informed by a grammatical rule, frequency of auxiliaries in the input or whether both grammatical and statistical knowledge could be eclipsed by processing difficulties. Eye-tracking and timed acceptability judgment data showed that – unlike native speakers – these L2 learners were unskilled readers of the target language and that their processing was still non-optimal. In particular, they did not process “core” (i. e., strongly agentive and inherently telic) and “peripheral” (i. e., less semantically specified) intransitive predicates differently, nor did they do so with “matching” and “mismatching” predicates. Frequency and transition probabilities speeded up learners’ decisions on acceptability, but did not affect response accuracy or reading patterns. Finally, recency and length of classroom instruction – unlike learners’ L1, duration of stay in Italy, and proficiency level – positively correlated with greater nativelikeness in the processing of auxiliaries. Our results indicate that beginning L2-Italian learners – as long as their processing is still non-optimal – are not sensitive to the consequences of the unaccusative/unergative split at the syntax-semantics interface.

VALICO-UD: Treebanking an Italian Learner Corpus in Universal Dependencies

This article describes an ongoing project for the development of a novel Italian treebank in Universal Dependencies format: VALICO-UD. It consists of texts written by Italian L2 learners of different mother tongues (German, French, Spanish and English) drawn from VALICO, an Italian learner corpus elicited by comic strips. Aiming at building a parallel treebank currently missing for Italian L2, comparable with those exploited in Natural Language Processing tasks, we associated each learner sentence with a target hypothesis (i.e. a corrected version of the learner sentence written by an Italian native speaker), which is in turn annotated in Universal Dependencies. The treebank VALICO-UD is composed of 237 texts written by non-native speakers of Italian (2,234 sentences) and the related target hypotheses, all automatically annotated using UDPipe. A portion of this resource (36 texts corresponding to 398 learner sentences and related target hypotheses)—firstly released on May 2021 in the Universal Dependencies repository—is associated with error annotation and the automatic output is fully manually checked. In this article, we focus especially on the challenges addressed in treebanking a resource composed of learner texts. In addition, we report on a preliminary data exploration that makes use of three quantitative measures for assessing the quality of the data and for better understanding the role that this resource can play in tasks lying at the intersection of Computational Linguistics and learner corpus studies.

Masked Morphological Priming and Sensitivity to the Statistical Structure of Form-to-Meaning Mapping in L2.

In one’s native language, visual word identification is based on early morphological analysis and is sensitive to the statistical structure of the mapping between form and meaning (Orthography–to–Semantic Consistency, OSC). How these mechanisms apply to a second language is much less clear. We recruited L1 Italian–L2 English speakers for a masked priming task where the relationship between prime and target was morphologically transparent, e.g., employer–EMPLOY, morphologically opaque, e.g., corner-CORN, or merely orthographic, e.g., brothel–BROTH. Critically, participants underwent thorough testing of their lexical, morphological, phonological, spelling, and semantic proficiency in their second language. By exploring a wide spectrum of L2 proficiency, we showed that this factor critically qualifies L2 priming. Genuine morphological facilitation only arises as proficiency grows, while orthographic priming shrinks as L2 competence increases. OSC was also found to modulate priming and interact with proficiency, providing an alternative way of describing the transparency continuum in derivational morphology. Overall, these data illustrate the trajectory towards a fully consolidated L2 lexicon and show that masked priming and sensitivity to OSC are key trackers of this process.

Is it only about only? A Study on Focus Particle Placement Acceptability in L2 English Learners and English Monolinguals

The placement of adverbs has been widely studied over the last few decades, both in first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. While traditional grammars teach that the preferred order in English is (S)ubject, (A)dverb, and (V)erb, adverbs which introduce focus receive less attention. Focus particles take scope over the constituents they precede, making their placement and interpretation in a sentence variable. In this study I investigate the acceptability of Focus particle (only, even, also) placement when used as adverbs in 96 participants: 48 Italian L2 English learners and 48 English monolinguals.

Writing in Italian L2 A Study on the Referential Movement and the Mechanisms of Cohesion in Descriptive and Narrative Texts

This article presents a study on L2 writing in Italian and it aims to analyse the organisation of the information and the mechanisms of cohesion in descriptive and narrative texts written by Chinese speaking university students. For this purpose, the study, within the framework of the Quaestio model, examines, on the one hand, the global text structure and, on the other, the referential movement in the domains of time, space, persons and objects. Finally, it focuses on the cohesive devices employed by the informants. The results highlight differences between descriptive and narrative texts, concerning both the distribution of the information and cohesive relations.

Pragmatics of L2 gestures in beginners’ classes of Italian

This article examines the responses that two groups of beginners of Italian in Canada (n=30) and in Italy (n=30) contributed to a multimodal exercise, where six culturally-based Italian gestures were presented alone and in combination with mini-dialogues. The main goal of this study was to encourage Italian L2 pedagogy to become more oriented towards the teaching of the pragmatics of body movements occurring during interactions. This work advocates that it is important to promote awareness of the pragmatic roles of the body from the early stages of language development to better prepare L2 learners in the recognition of the nonverbal contents communicated in a target language. One of the main results of this study suggests that combining target gestures with speech is a necessary pedagogical approach to enable the understanding of the semantics and the pragmatics of multimodal messages in L2 communication.

THE RELEVANCE OF CONTEXT IN UNFAMILIAR L2 IDIOM COMPREHENSION

The present study investigates to what extent the effect of context is responsible in facilitating L2 idiom comprehension. Forty students of Italian as a foreign language (L1 Croatian) completed comprehension tests consisting of unfamiliar L2 Italian metaphorical idioms, first presented with only general context and then with a specific context. To date, a large number of studies have described and analysed factors that influence the recognition and comprehension of idioms in one’s native language, and in the last twenty years the same topic has also been investigated for L2 idiom comprehension. However, many of these studies differ in terms of methodology (eye-tracking, control L1 groups, comprehension tests), the aim of the study, and ultimately, the corpus of the study (processing literal vs. metaphorical recognition, unfamiliar vs. familiar idioms, typology of idioms). Through a carefully designed questionnaire, in this study we exclude all possible factors that could influence idiom comprehension and isolate the context factor in the results. Given that in our previous research (2018) we collected highly unfamiliar Italian L2 opaque idioms and idioms without absolute and partial formal equivalents in Croatian, such as essere al verde, essere in gamba, and essere nato con la camicia, we can now psycholinguisticaly analyse to what extent the appropriate context can infer the correct comprehension of Italian L2 idioms.

I VERBI SINTAGMATICI IN PARLANTI DI ITALIANO L1, L2 E BILINGUI: UN’INDAGINE SPERIMENTALE

The article investigates the use of Particle Verbs (PV) by different types of speakers: Italian L1 speakers, Italian L2 speakers with German mother tongue (L2ers) and bilingual speakers of Italian and Trentino dialects. After outlining the state of the art in the research on PV and the theoretical framework (section 1), the main differences, among PV in Italian, its dia- lects and Germanic languages, are highlighted (section 2). The differences are, as follows: the extension of the phenomenon, the semantic meanings, and the syntax of the construction. These three categories have been taken into account while performing the quantitative and qualitative analysis. The third section describes the experimental research, introduced by a paragraph outlining the research carried out on PVs and L2ers so far. The current study used a story-telling task to elicit semi-spontaneous data to analyze (methodology 3.1). The quantita- tive analysis pointed out a statistically significant difference of the use of PVs among the three groups (section 3.2), while, through the qualitative analysis, the emphasis has been put on the use of PVs according to their semantics and syntax (section 3.3). In the discussion (section 4), the findings are connected to the theoretical framework, confirming the hypothesis that multilingual competence plays a role in the frequency of use of these constructions.

Bilingual Education as an Instrument of Ethnic Minority Protection: The Case of Italian L2 in the Slovene Littoral

Abstract The educational system is an essential form of institutional support to ethnolinguistic vitality. In the bilingual areas of the Slovene Littoral, Italian as minority language is offered in schools with Slovene as language of instruction as a compulsory subject with the aim of educating learners for interethnic and intercultural communication. The article discusses the relationships between social and individual factors in the development of communicative competence in the minority language. Data were collected by means of a Likert scale questionnaire. The results reveal the language behaviour of Slovene speakers as age related and strongly associated to the subjective relevance of Italian in their private life. Differences in contact with Italian were also observed, however they appear to be more related to levels of language proficiency than age.

Fostering intercultural language education

For a long time the removal of the mother tongue was considered by teachers as the indispensable premise for learning the new language, underestimating the value that the interference between the two different language systems can bring in terms of further enrichment of each. Lack of adequate support from educational institutions leads to fragility and identity crises. The school should look at linguistic and cultural diversity, attributing to it an additional and never subtractive value. The teaching of Italian L2 in the school context must respond to two major needs: to allow children and young people who speak other languages to learn Italian in order to communicate at school and outside school; to allow them, at the same time that they learn Italian for basic communicative uses, to continue their studies in the new language, following the other disciplines using affective/relational support methods.