Italian Speakers Research Articles

The Semantics of Happiness and Joy in the Italian Language

Abstract A number of contemporary researchers have proposed considering happiness and joy as distinct phenomena and theoretical constructs. However, there is as yet insufficient information regarding whether the theoretical and empirical arguments for distinguishing happiness from joy also apply to folk representations of these concepts. This work presents two studies in which Italian speakers performed a free-listing task asking them to list words semantically equivalent to the Italian words felicità (happiness) (Study 1) and gioia (joy) (Study 2). A comparison between the two studies revealed that the Italian concepts of happiness and joy had 49 lexical items in common, 32 of which related to emotions. Interestingly, 11 of the latter ranked in the top 10 cognitive salience indexes obtained from both Study 1 and Study 2. It is argued that the semantic similarities between the two words examined – felicità and gioia – should not overshadow the meaning nuances distinguishing them.

Collocation in the Mind: Investigating Collocational Priming in Second Language Speakers of Italian

AbstractCollocational priming is a priming effect induced by collocationally related words; it has been taken to explain the cognitive reality of collocation. Collocational priming has largely been observed in first language (L1) speakers, whereas work on the representation of collocation in a second language (L2) is still limited. In the present study, we sought to investigate this phenomenon in L1 and L2 speakers of Italian. We used a lexical decision task to explore collocational priming in verb–noun and noun–adjective collocations differing in frequency and collocational strength. Both L1 and L2 speakers were found sensitive to the frequency of collocations. Importantly, exposure to L2 Italian was found to play a role. The results suggest that collocational priming occurs both in L1 and L2 speakers, and that the mechanisms associated with collocation processing and representation in L1 and L2 speakers may be comparable.

Gender agreement in Italian compounds with capo-

Abstract Gender inflection for animated nouns in Italian presents challenges influenced by societal pressures and linguistic structure, especially in morphologically complex words like compounds. The study investigates gender inflection distribution in compounds with capo- compared to other nouns (i.e., occupations traditionally performed by women, by men, and the word capo in isolation), exploring the interplay of social, etymological and morphological factors. 192 native Italian speakers inflected masculine nouns to feminine forms after hearing the stimulus. Results reveal that respondents’ attitudes towards gender-fair language significantly determine the use of feminine, indicating a complex interplay between linguistic structures and social perceptions. Despite historical resistance, the word capa in isolation shows increasing acceptance, challenging entrenched norms. In compounds, capo- element’s gender inflection appears more resistant due to morphological complexity, with an interaction with number. This study advances our understanding of gender inflection, with implications for broader conversations about gender representation and language inclusivity.

The acquisition of Polarity Items in L3/Ln Catalan by speakers of English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish: implications for L3/Ln development theorising and language teaching

ABSTRACT This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit and explicit evidence about the negative system as presented in textbooks. We test 89 Ln learners of Catalan (L1 English/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese) on the interpretation of PIs in non-veridical contexts. The findings reveal that initially, learners exhibit both facilitative and non-facilitative transfer from their prior languages (L1/L2), and that grammatical restructuring in L3/Ln development is influenced by learners’ language background, syntactic context, and proficiency in Catalan. The results indicate a tendency towards stagnation and reduced accuracy throughout the learning process, especially among learners whose L1 had a facilitative effect either during initial transfer or later stages of development. These observations are discussed in the context of theories of morphosyntactic transfer in L3/Ln acquisition, as well as L3 development. The paper also evidences that the presentation of PIs in textbooks can shape and restructure learners’ interpretation of these items and proposes acquisitionally and pedagogically informed criteria for the instruction of PIs to Catalan learners.

Translating Non-standard Language

Andrea Camilleri has gained significant success in the last decades with his works written in a special language: by creating a language similar to Sicilian dialect but understandable to other Italian speakers he heavily involved his Sicilian cultural heritage as well and brought it closer not only to an Italian, but a worldwide audience. How are this idiolect and the cultural elements translatable into other languages? There are various approaches, as shown in Quaderni camilleriani 3, and the techniques depend greatly on the target language. In Camilleri’s novels, not only the aforementioned diatopic, but also diastratic and diaphasic variation are characteristic, which is another factor the translator has to take into consideration. In this paper I would like to examine the translator’s choices in Hungarian regarding this multilingualism. Currently there are seven volumes available in Hungary, four of them translated by Margit Lukácsi, one by Noémi Kovács and Kornél Zaránd, and the last two by Ádám András Kürthy. The paper is also a parallel work to Giulia Magazzù’s, which aims to examine the translations in English of three novels, two of which are in common with this paper: Il cane di terracotta and La forma dell’acqua.

Effects of Grammatical Gender on Gender Inferences: Experimental Evidence From Italian Common Gender Nouns

Recent psycholinguistic research has focused on how different grammatical gender marking strategies affect people's mental representation of referents’ gender. Such works particularly explored how explicitly encoded linguistic elements, such as grammatical gender markers, may drive the inferential process as attentional clues. Results of reading comprehension tasks in French and German have shown that the explicit encoding of masculine gender in plural forms of role nouns often leads to a male bias, a specific masculine inference corresponding to the grammatical gender clue, even when the masculine form was intended as generic, thus including women and men. Moreover, comparing generic masculine forms with gender-fair alternatives revealed that the latter significantly reduce this male bias. The present study examines the impact of three gender marking strategies on the construction of generic mental representations. Indeed, the experiment tested generic masculine against two gender-fair forms (split masculine/feminine forms and ambiguous syntactic reformulations) among 38 Italian speakers. No significant effect was found in generating a generic mental representation through form manipulation. However, ambiguous syntactic reformulation realised by presenting target nouns from the Italian common gender noun class and through the neutralisation of determiners’ gender, increased the probability of a male-specific inference. Additionally, a keen interest in gender-fair language topics was linked to longer reaction times, indicating a higher cognitive effort during the inference process.

Moving to continuous classifications of bilingualism through machine learning trained on language production

Abstract Recent conceptualisations of bilingualism are moving away from strict categorisations, towards continuous approaches. This study supports this trend by combining empirical psycholinguistics data with machine learning classification modelling. Support vector classifiers were trained on two datasets of coded productions by Italian speakers to predict the class they belonged to (“monolingual”, “attriters” and “heritage”). All classes can be predicted above chance (>33%), even if the classifier's performance substantially varies, with monolinguals identified much better (f-score >70%) than attriters (f-score <50%), which are instead the most confusable class. Further analyses of the classification errors expressed in the confusion matrices qualify that attriters are identified as heritage speakers nearly as often as they are correctly classified. Cluster clitics are the most identifying features for the classification performance. Overall, this study supports a conceptualisation of bilingualism as a continuum of linguistic behaviours rather than sets of a priori established classes.

Exploring variation in English and Italian relative clause attachment: The role of coordination

This study investigates the effect of coordination on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in English and Italian. We also examined the interplay of RC length and DP positions on attachment preferences in coordinate structures, conducting a partial replication of previous results on English (Hemforth et al. 2015). In two offline force-choice tasks, English speakers favored local attachment, while Italian speakers showed a strong preference for non-local attachment across all conditions. This pattern aligns with established variation across the two languages, but interestingly deviates from earlier reports showing the effects of RC-Head type, RC length, and DP position on attachment decisions. Our findings thus suggest that further attention needs to be paid to the complex interaction of different, potentially understudied, structural factors when investigating disambiguation mechanisms across languages.

QUESTION PRODUCTION IN ITALIAN-SPEAKING PWAGR

This paper presents the results of an elicitation task run with Italian-speaking people with agrammatic aphasia (PWAgr). Linguistic theories of aphasia have analysed the production of PWAgr as stemming either from a deterioration of grammatical knowledge or a limitation of extra-linguistic capacities which affect language. Among the former, the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997) relates the height of the projections involved in the production of a structure with the chances of it being produced: the stronger the impairment in the speaker, the less likely they are to produce a structure involving higher nodes. Alternatively, syntactic knowledge may be preserved but its use is compromised by Working Memory (WM) limitations (e.g., Miyake et al., 1994; Jakubowicz, 2005). The two approaches make different predictions with respect to question production in Italian: according to the TPH, the production rates of yes/no-questions and who-questions should be comparable in moderate and mild aphasia. Why-questions involve a higher node and should thus not be available. Under a WM-limitation approach, the production rates of why-questions and yes/no-questions should be comparable and higher than those of who-questions. To determine which, if any, of the two approaches makes the correct predictions, three adult Italian speakers diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia and one with anomia performed an elicitation task targeting these three types of structures. Overall, yes/no-questions were the most frequent structures to be produced. The lack of who-questions, as opposed to the production of yes/no-questions, can be accounted for only if derivational complexity is taken into account, but the scarcity of why-questions suggests that the height of the nodes involved may play a role as well.

Development and Evaluation of the Italian Version of the Dichotic Digit Test: Insights from 39 Normal-Hearing Children Aged 11 to 13 years.

BACKGROUND The dichotic digit test (DDT) is one of the tests for the behavioral assessment of central auditory processing. Dichotic listening tests are sensitive ways of assessing cortical structures, the corpus callossum, and binaural integration mechanisms, showing strong correlations with learning difficulties. The DDT is presently available in a number of languages, each appropriate for the subject's native language. However, there is presently no test in the Italian language. The goal of this study was to develop an Italian version of the one-pair dichotic digit test (DDT-IT) and analyze results in 39 normal-hearing Italian children 11 to 13 years old. We used 2 conditions of presentation: free recall and directed attention (left or right ear), and looked at possible effects of sex and ear side. MATERIAL AND METHODS This study involved 3 steps: creation of the stimuli, checking their quality with Italian speakers, and assessment of the DDT-IT in our subject pool. The study involved 39 children (26 girls and 13 boys), aged 11-13 years. All participants underwent basic audiological assessment, auditory brainstem response, and then DDT-IT. RESULTS Results under free recall and directed attention conditions were similar for right and left ears, and there were no sex or age effects. CONCLUSIONS The Italian version of DDT (DDT-IT) has been developed and its performance on 39 normal-hearing Italian children was assessed. We found there were no age or sex effects for either the free recall condition or the directed attention condition.

I want to be safe: understanding the main drivers behind vaccination choice throughout the pandemic

BackgroundDespite being a major advancement in modern medicine, vaccines face widespread hesitancy and refusal, posing challenges to immunization campaigns. The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated vaccine hesitancy, emphasizing the pivotal role of beliefs in efficacy and safety on vaccine acceptance rates. This study explores the influence of efficacy and safety perceptions on vaccine uptake in Italy during the pandemic.MethodsWe administered a 70-item questionnaire to a representative sample of 600 Italian speakers. Participants were tasked with assessing the perceived effectiveness and safety of each vaccine dose, along with providing reasons influencing their vaccination choices. Additionally, we conducted an experimental manipulation, exploring the effects of four framing messages that emphasized safety and/or efficacy on participants’ willingness to receive a hypothetical fourth vaccine dose. Furthermore, participants were asked about their level of trust in the scientific community and public authorities, as well as their use of different information channels for obtaining COVID-19-related information.ResultsOur study reveals a dynamic shift in vaccine efficacy and safety perceptions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially influencing vaccination compliance. Initially perceived as more effective than safe, this assessment reversed by the time of the third dose. Beliefs regarding safety, rather than efficacy, played a significant role in anticipating future vaccinations (e.g., the booster dose). Safety-focused messages positively affected vaccination intent, while efficacy-focused messages showed limited impact. We also observed a changing trend in reasons for vaccination, with a decline in infection-related reasons and an increase in social related ones. Furthermore, trust dynamics evolved differently for public authorities and the scientific community.ConclusionsVaccine perception is a dynamic process shaped by evolving factors like efficacy and safety perceptions, trust levels, and individual motivations. Our study sheds light on the complex dynamics that underlie the perception of vaccine safety and efficacy, and their impact on willingness to vaccinate. We discuss these results in light of bounded rationality, loss aversion and classic utility theory.

Intonation of polar questions in German-dominant heritage speakers of Italian

Abstract In heritage language (HL) research, prosodic aspects of heritage speakers (HSs) speech have only recently started to receive attention and the results have been mixed. While some studies report cross-linguistic influence (CLI) for HL intonation, others consider it robust. The present study contributes to this debate and examines the intonational patterns of polar questions (PolQs) in the two languages of 30 HSs of Italian with German as majority language. This language combination displays overlapping and distinct intonational patterns in PolQs, making intonation potentially subject to CLI in bilingual language acquisition. The results of an elicited production task indicate that HSs maintain a systemic difference between their two languages. In German, HSs produce PolQs in a monolingual like manner. In Italian of HSs, both monolingual-like performance and CLI from German has been observed. Early Italian use is beneficial for monolingual-like outcomes in the HL.

A Voice User Interface on the Edge for People with Speech Impairments

Nowadays, fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful technique in machine learning, enabling models to adapt to a specific domain by leveraging pre-trained knowledge. One such application domain is automatic speech recognition (ASR), where fine-tuning plays a crucial role in addressing data scarcity, especially for languages with limited resources. In this study, we applied fine-tuning in the context of atypical speech recognition, focusing on Italian speakers with speech impairments, e.g., dysarthria. Our objective was to build a speaker-dependent voice user interface (VUI) tailored to their unique needs. To achieve this, we harnessed a pre-trained OpenAI’s Whisper model, which has been exposed to vast amounts of general speech data. However, to adapt it specifically for disordered speech, we fine-tuned it using our private corpus including 65 K voice recordings contributed by 208 speech-impaired individuals globally. We exploited three variants of the Whisper model (small, base, tiny), and by evaluating their relative performance, we aimed to identify the most accurate configuration for handling disordered speech patterns. Furthermore, our study dealt with the local deployment of the trained models on edge computing nodes, with the aim to realize custom VUIs for persons with impaired speech.

Perceptie van een anderstalig accent: Een experimentele studie naar de perceptieve aanpassing aan een exogeen geaccentueerd Nederlands klinkercontrast

This study examines whether Dutch L1 listeners adapt to Italian accented Dutch vowels, and how short-term experience with one L2 speaker’s accent might help these listeners to understand novel words and other L2 speakers with a similar accent. 100 Belgian Dutch L1 listeners were exposed to 40 Dutch target words, in which the front vowel had been replaced by an ambiguous sound in between /ɪ/ and /i/. These stimuli were produced by a female Italian speaker of Dutch. To assess perceptual adaptation and generalization, participants were asked to identify the vowel in five Dutch /ɪ/-/i/ minimal pairs across two speaker conditions: stimuli were either produced by the same female speaker or by a digitally generated male-sounding speaker. For neither speaker did we find perceptual adaptation, hence no generalization to novel situations could be observed. The results highlight the importance of stimulus selection and the need for a detailed background questionnaire for listeners, including information on their familiarity with L2 accents.

Phishing attacks: An analysis of the victims’ characteristics based on administrative data

Using administrative data on phishing attacks targeting almost 150,000 Italian- and German-speaking customers of an Italian bank in 2022–23, we investigate how individual characteristics are associated to the likelihood of victimization. We find that younger customers and Italian speakers are more likely to be victims of phishing, while we find no differences in terms of gender or size of the place of residence.

Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian.

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra "I plays-3rd-person the guitar") yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso "the journalist go-1st-person out often"). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs.

Internet Addiction and Psychological Distress: Can Social Networking Site Addiction Affect Body Uneasiness Across Gender? A Mediation Model.

The Internet, with its unlimited information, revolutionary communication capabilities, and innovative potential to expand knowledge, is ubiquitous throughout the world, but it also has significant implications for users' mental health. Given the not yet clearly defined and distinguishable nosographic categories of online addiction and the resulting difficulties in describing the impact on users' mental health, the present cross-sectional study aimed to gain new insights into the relationship between Internet addiction (especially social networking site [SNS] addiction), psychological distress, and physical discomfort, as well as gender differences in impact among users. A sample of 583 Italian speakers (50.8% males; 48.7% females) with a mean age of 30.96 (SD = 12.12) completed an online survey in July 2021. A set of psychometric self-report instruments was administered to assess the study variables. Mediation analyses were performed for both the whole sample and across genders. The study found that men exhibited higher levels of Internet addiction and craving than women, but no differences were found for SNS addiction. Furthermore, indicators of psychological distress (i.e., anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, insomnia, and self-esteem) mediated the association between SNS addiction and body uneasiness, with slight differences across genders. This paper contributes to the existing literature on online addictive behaviors by also highlighting gender differences. The findings underscore the need for educational experiences that can prevent problematic use of the Internet and SNSs.

A genre-oriented analysis of TikTok instructional discourse

Abstract This study intends to contribute to the analysis of digital instructional discourse in order to gain an insight into how the EFL classroom has in some sense shifted online in the hands of amateur experts (Tolson 2010; Bhatia 2018), who create an informal learning environment by drawing on their discursive competence, disciplinary knowledge and professional practice. By incorporating quantitative, qualitative, and case study data, this article considers the value of genre analysis in educational social media research. It focuses, particularly, on the rhetorical and lexico-grammatical features of a selection of TikTok video mini-lessons targeting Italian speakers of English as a foreign language. Analysis of the data reveals that digital language teaching discourse on TikTok is a structured event with recurrent rhetorical patterns and linguistic features for achieving both pedagogical and promotional communicative purposes. The research bears considerable relevance given the need for the analysis of transformation processes in instructional discourse amid the widespread use of information and communication technologies and the advance of online learning.

After Self-Imitation Prosodic Training L2 Learners Converge Prosodically to the Native Speakers

Little attention is paid to prosody in second language (L2) instruction, but computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) offers learners solutions to improve the perception and production of L2 suprasegmentals. In this study, we extend with acoustic analysis a previous research showing the effectiveness of self-imitation training on prosodic improvements of Japanese learners of Italian. In light of the increased degree of correct match between intended and perceived pragmatic functions (e.g., speech acts), in this study, we aimed at quantifying the degree of prosodic convergence towards L1 Italian speakers used as a model for self-imitation training. To measure convergence, we calculated the difference in duration, F0 mean, and F0 max syllable-wise between L1 utterances and the corresponding L2 utterances produced before and after training. The results showed that after self-imitation training, L2 learners converged to the L1 speakers. The extent of the effect, however, varied based on the speech act, the acoustic measure, and the distance between L1 and L2 speakers before the training. The findings from perceptual and acoustic investigations, taken together, show the potential of self-imitation prosodic training as a valuable tool to help L2 learners communicate more effectively.

To the question of androcentrism of the grammatical category of gender in Italian language

The article analyses the processes of feminisation of some nouns occurring in the Italian language in connection with the struggle against the manifestations of masculine mentality. The asymmetry of feminine and masculine genders in the declension of nouns and adjectives is fixed in the Italian language at the grammatical level. However, in recent decades, due to the growth of feminist sentiments in the world and the increasing attention to social gender, this grammatical norm has caused more and more disputes in Italian society, the use of the masculine gender is undergoing a kind of gender censorship. The established gender hierarchy of language has been perceived by some politicians and cultural figures as incorrect, disadvantaging the representation of women in discourse, especially when it comes to the so-called "nomi di ruolo" - nouns denoting staff positions (mayor, councillor, chairman, prime minister, judge). Gender markers, which are natural for the language, receive additional connotative meaning, their semantic significance expands: along with the grammatical category, they begin to express the speaker's social position, his views on the political agenda in relation to feminist sentiments. The paper will examine gender in Italian as a grammatical category, then highlight the main grammatical tools that Italian linguists propose to use in order to equalise the asymmetry of femininity and masculinity in modern Italian. Different perspectives of native Italian speakers on such grammatical changes in the category of gender will be presented and possible options for levelling the asymmetry towards androcentrism will be analysed.