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| 2. |
- Bernardini, Petra, et al.
(författare)
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Acquisition, variation, change: On the definite article and kinship nouns in Italian
- 2006
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper treets the acquisition, variation and historical change in the use of the article with kinship names in Italian, or more precisely, the Florentine variety of Italian. The development in acquisition data and historical texts is compared regarding the use of the definitive article together with kinship nouns. The children studied in this paper classify DPs in non-target-like ways apparently following semantic criteria such as inalienability, uniqueness, or familiarity. On the basis of such categories, children spontaneously create noun classes distinguished by precise morpho-syntactic properties. The development of morphological definiteness in these children seems to be guided by the subsequent appearance of deixis and number: a target-like usage of the article is reached only when the features person and plural are in place in the children’s productions. Person and plural are the very two categories that are known to correlate with morphological definiteness on kinship nouns in modern Italian dialects, as well as in the 14th century Florentine data. Hence, the origins of dialectal variation and historical change lies in child language.
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| 3. |
- Bernardini, Petra, et al.
(författare)
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Bilingual acquisition of object clitics in Romanian and Italian
- 2014
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Ingår i: Structure, Use, and Meaning in Intercultural Settings. - 9786061904662 ; , s. 17-30
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Object clitics (OCL) have been shown to be acquired differently with respect to their placement in monolingual and bilingual speakers. Previous studies have mainly focused on Romance-Germanic bilinguals (see Hamann & Belletti 2006; Granfeldt 2012), but this paper is based on Italian-Romanian bilinguals. 27 children, aged 4-9, 16 in Italy and 11 in Romania, were exposed to an elicited production task for 3rd pers. direct OCL pronouns in Romanian and Italian. In accordance with previous studies on OCL in bilingual acquisition, the children produced OCLs, omitting and/or replacing them sometimes with full lexical NPs and sometimes misplaced them,. However, we found also gender errors and tense/mood switches, in both Italian and Romanian, related to the placement of OCL in Romanian. Our results suggest that the bilingual acquisition of OCL is different dependent on which languages are involved.
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| 4. |
- Bernardini, Petra, et al.
(författare)
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Collettivi, nomi
- 2010
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Ingår i: Il vocabolario Treccani : Enciclopedia dell'italiano. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana. - 9788812000401 ; 1: A-L, s. 227-229
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 6. |
- Bernardini, Petra, et al.
(författare)
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Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis
- 2004
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Ingår i: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. - 1366-7289. ; 7:1, s. 49-69
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher syntactic structure lexically instantiated in the stronger language combined with lower portions in the weaker language. Code-mixing patterns were studied in five Swedish-French/Italian children aged 2-4. The parts of the code-mixed utterances reflected as much syntactic structure of each language as was used in monolingual utterances in the same recording of each child. This uneven development, which is due to different amounts of input of the two languages, can be accounted for by assuming that syntactic structure is acquired by building each language from the bottom up through lexical learning.
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| 7. |
- Bernardini, Petra
(författare)
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L'italiano come prima e seconda (madre)lingua : Indagine longitudinale sullo sviluppo del DP
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with the development of the DP (the Determiner Phrase) in bilingual first (2L1) and in adult second (L2) language acquisition of Italian, with a focus on a case study of Italian as a second first language. The thesis suggests that the bilingual children and the Swedish adult learners develop the Italian DP differently. The child acquiring Italian as a second first language develops Italian more like the adults, but he sets the parameters of the DP in an order different both from Italian as a first first language and from Italian as a second language in adult learners. Transfer is claimed to occur both in the boy who acquires Italian as a second first language and in the adults, but only with regard to the N-raising parameter (Cinque, 1995) in the child, and in all three parameters investigated in the adult learners. The empirical part contains three interrelated analyses. The first analysis deals with gender and number concord and development. The children and the adults differ in the order of development between gender and number: the children seem to acquire gender as an intrinsic feature of the Italian nouns. In the Swedish adult L2 learners, number is marked early, but gender remains problematic in all the recordings. In addition, transfer of the Swedish gender specification of nouns could be argued to occur in the adult L2 learners, but not in the bilingual children. The results may speak against theories of L2 acquisition where an initial absence of FCs is postulated and support theories where transfer and full access to UG are postulated. The results also speak in favour of a gradual development of phrase structure in 2L1 acquisition. The second analysis deals with the development and omission of determiners. With respect to the development of determiners, following our hypothesis concerning the setting of the Italian value of the determiner parameter (Bottari et al., 2001), determiners that are XPs should appear before determiners that are Xºs if transfer from Swedish occurs. This is borne out in the data, and an age difference is revealed. In the 2L1 children, the determiner that is an Xº (the definite article) appears before the other determiners (XPs), while in the adults, the reverse pattern is observed. Following our hypothesis concerning the Italian value of the determiner parameter, with respect to the universal determiner requirement, transfer of the Swedish value should imply omission of determiners in preverbal subject position. The transfer hypothesis is borne out in the adult L2 data, as they omit determiners in this position. The children omit determiners mainly in verbless utterances, but as soon as verbs appear, they supply them quite regularly. We argue that the adults transfer the way the determiner request is satisfied, namely with Nº to Dº movement instead of direct insertion of an element in Spec-DP or Dº. The children do not transfer this way of satisfying the determiner request, but omit determiners one at a time when their NPs are not yet arguments to verbs. The third analysis shows that word order of the DP is acquired differently by the child who has Italian as a second L1, as compared to monolingual Italian children, but in a way similarly to the adult L2 learners: qualitative adjectives are mainly positioned after the noun and possessives are only positioned after the noun in the boy who has Italian as a second 2L1 and in the adult L2 learners, whereas the monolingual L1 Italian children and the girl who acquires Italian as a first 2L1 position the qualitative adjectives mainly after the noun, and the possessive in both positions. We argue that the N-raising parameter is set later in the case of Italian as a second 2L1 and as a L2 in adulthood, due to influence from Swedish. In conclusion, the main results are accounted for if we assume that the initial state of 2L1 and L2 is fundamentally different: the 2L1 initial state is built on two lexicons, and only word order parameters may be subject to transfer, depending similarities in the surface word order in the two languages (Müller & Hulk, 2001). In adult L2 acquisition, on the other hand, all parameter values seem to be subject to transfer from L1, due to the fact that L2 initial state is built on the L1 lexicon (v. d. Craats, 2000).
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| 8. |
- Bernardini, Petra
(författare)
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Lo squilibrio nell'acquisizione di due lingue nell'infanzia
- 2001
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis treats the acquisition of Italian (and Swedish) in two bilingal children ad a control group of six monolingal Italian cildren (for some domains studied). It is a longitudinal study of the spontaneaous speech of the children. In both children one language is weaker than the other in terms of MLU, amount of utterances and code-mixing while speeking with an interlocutor of the respective language. The input in the two languages is also considered as a factor that may have an impact on which language becomes the weaker one. The thesis treets the development of the determiner phrase (nouns, adjectives, articles and possessive pronouns) as well as code-mixing and transfer, within the theory of generative grammar. The results show for instance that: -some domains of morpho-syntax are more vulnerable to transfer than others (i.e. determiners are not but adjectives are)and that this is more evident in the weaker language; - the weaker language has a different developmental path than the stronger language in the acquisition of adjectives;
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| 9. |
- Bernardini, Petra, et al.
(författare)
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On cross‐linguistic variation and measures of linguistic complexity in learner texts: Italian, French and English
- 2019
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Ingår i: International Journal of Applied Linguistics. - : Wiley. - 1473-4192 .- 0802-6106. ; 29:2, s. 211-232
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The paper investigates possible effects of cross‐linguistic variation on measures of syntactic complexity in 60 texts from Swedish L1 learners of English, French and Italian as foreign languages at CEFR level A and CEFR level B. A previous study on the same learners and texts, showed significant differences between proficiency levels for two length measures of complexity in English and French, but not in Italian. In this paper we hypothesize that due to the Null Subject property of Italian, the developmental prediction for some complexity measures might be different in Italian compared to French and English. In fact, previous research has suggested that beginner learners of Italian overuse overt subjects which might lead to higher scores, relatively speaking, of length measures in Italian at the lowest levels of proficiency. However, contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find more Null subjects at CEFR level B than at CEFR level A, but we did find clear restrictions on their distribution. We conclude that we are a long way from understanding how cross‐linguistic differences interact with other variables such as tasks and language combinations and what the effects might be on measures of syntactic complexity.
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| 10. |
- Bernardini, Petra, et al.
(författare)
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On the direction of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of object clitics in French and Italian
- 2017
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Ingår i: LIA Language, Interaction and Acquisition. - 1879-7865. ; 8:2, s. 204-233
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Placement errors of object clitics (OCL) in French have been documented in 2L1 and L2 but not in L1 acquisition (Granfeldt, 2012; Hamann & Belletti, 2006). In the present study, we investigate whether placement errors of third person singular OCLs may be due to cross-linguistic influence. We exposed bilingual children (successive L1 French/L2 Italian and L1 Italian/L2 French and simultaneous 2L1 Italian/French) to an OCL elicitation task. The results showed significant differences between the 2L1 and L2 groups in comparison with the L1 groups, and between the languages, thus corroborating the findings of previous studies. Production accuracy of OCLs in general was highest in L1, and higher in Italian than in French. However, OCL placement errors were found in 2L1 French and L2 Italian as well as in the L1 French of children who had Italian as L2. These findings suggest that cross-linguistic influence is bidirectional (Foroodi-Nejad & Paradis, 2009; Chenjie Gu, 2010; Nicoladis, 1999). We discuss these results in relation to the proposal that cross-linguistic influence should occur only in one direction, i.e. only in one language, and only under certain conditions (Hulk & Müller, 2000; Müller & Hulk, 2001).
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