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Structural similarity across domains in third language acquisition
Edited by Nadine Kolb, Natalia Mitrofanova and Marit Westergaard
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 13:5] 2023
► pp. 663–692

Does your regional variety help you acquire an additional language?

Spanish differential object marking in Northern and Southern Italians

ORCID logo | Universitat Pompeu Fabra
ORCID logo | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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.
Keywords: DOM, bidialectalism, Italo-Romance varieties, L3 acquisition, Spanish
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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 17 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22057.per
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