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Article In: Journal of Second Language Studies: Online-First Articles

L1 proximity and syntactic complexity in L2 Italian acquisition

Evidence from Clitic Pronouns

ORCiD logo with link | Universitat de les Illes BalearsPalma, Spain
 | Universitat de les Illes BalearsPalma, Spain
 | Universitat de les Illes BalearsPalma, Spain
 | Universitat de les Illes BalearsPalma, Spain
 | University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Abstract
Studies on second language acquisition suggest that clitic pronouns are challenging syntactic elements for L2ers to acquire. This study examines the acquisition of Italian accusative clitics by Spanish and Swedish L2ers. Extending Romano, F. (2020). Ultimate attainment in heritage language speakers: Syntactic and morphological knowledge of Italian accusative clitics. Applied Psycholinguistics, 411, 347–380. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar research on Swedish speakers, it employs an oral structural priming task and a speeded grammatical judgment task to examine how L1 proximity and syntactic complexity influence clitic production and processing. Both tasks included clitic left-dislocated sentences in which the host verb (lexical, quasi-functional, or functional) varied according to the hierarchy proposed by Cardinaletti, A., & Shlonsky, U. (2004). Clitic positions and restructuring in Italian. Linguistic Inquiry, 351, 519–557. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. Results revealed that Spanish L2ers did not differ from natives but descriptively outperformed Swedish L2ers in production. Speakers’ performance varied across host verb types associated with different structural configurations. In processing, grammaticality was the main factor modulating acceptability across groups. These findings highlight the interplay between typological proximity and processing in the functional and lexical domains of L2 clitic acquisition.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The morphosyntax of accusative clitics in Romance languages and Swedish
  • 3.Acquisition of Italian accusative clitics
  • 4.The study
    • 4.1Research questions
    • 4.2Hypotheses
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Tasks and procedure
      • 5.2.1Structural priming task
      • 5.2.2Speeded grammatical judgment task (GJT)
    • 5.3Data analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Priming task
    • 6.2Speeded GJT
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion and future directions
  • Declaration of interest
  • Data availability statement
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • Author queries
  • References
References (44)
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