Does your regional variety help you acquire an additional language?
Spanish differential object marking in Northern and Southern Italians
This study investigates Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Italian speakers from two dialectal areas–North and
South Italy–learning Spanish. Southern Italo-Romance varieties exhibit a DOM system through a-marking, like
Spanish, whereas the Northern varieties, like Standard Italian, only allow DOM with pronouns. Given the structural differences and
similarities among these typologically close languages, we ask whether a stigmatized oral regional variety has the potential to
transfer in the acquisition of additional languages. Participants (n = 103) completed an acceptability judgment
task (AJT) and an oral production task testing DOM in [±animate, ±definite] DP contexts. The results revealed differences
modulated by proficiency in the written AJT that moderately favored the Northern learners and in the oral production task that
favored the Southern learners. These findings suggest that low-prestige varieties may not have the full potential to transfer at
early stages of acquisition due to their inhibition in formal contexts, but that they can emerge in less formal tasks. We argue
that current theoretical models that prioritize linguistic proximity as the primary source of transfer at initial stages of L3 acquisition are
unable to capture revealing patterns from understudied sociolinguistic contexts that bring new light to the study of
multilingualism.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The Sociolinguistic Scenario
- 3.Theoretical Models of L3 Acquisition
- 4.Differential Object Marking in the three Romance varieties
- 5.The Study
- 5.1Participants
- 5.2Proficiency test
- 5.3Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT)
- 5.4Oral Production Task (OPT)
- 6.Results
- 6.1The acceptability judgment task
- 6.2The oral production task: Overall and individual results
- 7.Discussion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Data availability statement
-
References
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Kolb, Nadine, Natalia Mitrofanova & Marit Westergaard
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