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School dropout is a multifaceted phenomenon that goes beyond the extreme act of leaving school behind without getting a diploma (Besozzi, 2006). It has to do with episodes of compulsory school evasion, dropping out, repeated failures, irregular attendance, falling behind the regular age as a result of repeats, transfers and low performance (Zurla, 2004). Among those who “fall behind”, in Italy, students with migrant background are three times more at risk of dropping out of school or of living some form of school hardship. In fact, in Italy in 2020, 35.4 % of so-called 'foreign' students experienced some form of early school dropout compared to 11% of natives (ISTAT, 2021). Nevertheless, the background of the migrant does not trigger early dropout, but rather the intertwining of multiple variables which can be compiled in three groups: Socio-economic factors, such as educational level of parents (Tarabini, 2015), belonging to single-parent families (Turner, Thiede, 2018), and geographical segregation (Rothstein, 2005); causes endogenous to the school, like peer relationships (Wang, Eccles, 2012), teacher relationships (Wolley, Kol, Bowen, 2019), and school structure (Smeyers, 2006); lastly, personal variables, such as mental health (Dinh et al., 2013), lack of engagement (Rumberger, 2011), special educational needs (Johnson, Altmaier, Richman, 1999). Thus, in order to achieve a fair and equitable education, which succeeds in implementing actions to prevent school dropout, rather than “finger pointing” the migrant background of pupils, it would be desirable to implement a pedagogy of listening (Rogers, 1951), which stems from the personal experience of the children (Dewey, 1938) and values their cultural and linguistic heritage (Gibson, Bejinez, 2002; Grassi, Hanley, Liston, 2004). Given these theoretical assumptions, embedded in a transformative worldview (Mertens, 2009), this contribution aims to investigate whether and to what extent language and cultural enhancem

La nozione di appartenenza, da sempre intimamente intrecciata ai concetti di identità, identificazione e cittadinanza, secondo le più recenti teorie etno-sociolinguistiche scavalca questa categorizzazione dogmatica e giunge ad una concettualizzazione multi-razionale, fluida e multi-relazionale (Vallentin, 2017; Kuurne, Vieno, 2022). Anche se strettamente legata al luogo, al contesto e alla posizione (Anthias, 2016), l’appartenenza racchiude in sé aspetti culturali ed esperienze sociali che connettono le persone, creando un senso di appartenenza comune non prettamente fisica (Barth, 1969). È dunque proprio grazie a questa lettura sfaccettata, che concepisce l’appartenenza come un luogo sociale caratterizzato da relazioni ed emozioni (Yuval-Davis, 2006), che si sviluppano appartenenze multiple e complesse, negoziate nel quotidiano di ciascuno. Luoghi pubblici, quali le scuole, sono catalizzatori di convivenza di appartenenze multiple e diversificate, riunite sotto un unico tetto; luoghi che accolgono bambine e bambini con repertori linguistici variegati, che appartengono a un passato migratorio, più o meno lontano, a un presente locale italiano, e a un futuro ancora tutto da scoprire. Bambini che, se correttamente guidati, possono prendere consapevolezza del proprio vissuto e valorizzarlo, stimolando la maturazione delle proprie capacità di relazione, la ricerca della propria identità nella dimensione affettiva e sociale, e il decentramento conoscitivo del proprio vissuto (Brasca, Zambelli, 1992). Inserita in un paradigma trasformativo (Kawulich, 2012), che si rifà alla pedagogia degli oppressi (Freire, 1970) e alla Social Justice, la ricerca intende, da un lato, indagare da una prospettiva etnolinguistica le diverse rappresentazioni di appartenenza dei bambini e delle bambine di una scuola primaria del comune di Milano; dall’altro, secondo un approccio pedagogico-didattico, vuole comprendere quali strategie educative possano tutelare e valorizzare la ricchezz

As an increasing number of multilingual children are enrolled in European schools, it is important to gain more insight into teachers' attitudes towards multilingual approaches in education. The goal of this study is to investigate the attitudes of primary school teachers in Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, three countries that have a highly multilingual student population but differ with respect to the migration context and language policies. Using an online questionnaire, we assessed teachers' attitudes towards multilingualism in the school environment and their adherence to monolingual ideals. We aimed to compare the three countries and investigate which factors related to the teachers' background and school characteristics predict teachers' beliefs. The results suggest that teachers in Greece are significantly more positive towards multilingualism than teachers in Italy and the Netherlands, despite great individual variation. Moreover, for all three countries, we found that having received training on multilingualism had a positive effect on teachers' attitudes. In the Netherlands, we found that teachers who taught a greater proportion of multilingual students on average showed more positive attitudes towards multilingualism. We discuss the implications of these findings for educational language policy, highlighting the importance of evidence-based training on multilingualism for all teachers.

La scrittura è sia un’azione personale, sia un atto sociale; un compito complicato, che richiede anni di duro lavoro e impegno, soprattutto per i parlanti non nativi della lingua d’insegnamento. A tal proposito, la proposta di strategie ludiche e di scrittura creativa, che comporta la scrittura accompagnata dal disegno, può rivelarsi un’azione che supporta il pro-cesso di acquisizione linguistica, in quanto l’elemento ludico del testo creativo incoraggia gli studenti di L2 a giocare con la lingua e a correre dei rischi in un contesto non giudicante. Una ricerca-azione, che vuole indagare l’impatto della scrittura creativa di testi brevi sull’acquisizio-ne dell’italiano L2, ha coinvolto quattro bambine arabofone in un laboratorio di potenziamento dell’italiano come lingua seconda della durata di sei mesi. Attraverso un’analisi diacronica dei testi scritti dalle bambine è stato possibile osservare l’evoluzione dell’interlingua delle parteci-panti, notando un graduale avvicinamento allo standard italiano. L’evidente miglioramento nella calligrafia, nell’ortografia e nella morfologia suggerisce che la scrittura creativa di testi brevi possa essere una buona pratica da implementare nelle classi d’insegnamento dell’italiano come lingua seconda., Writing is both a personal action and a social act; a complicated task that requires years of hard work and commitment, especially for non-native speakers of the language of in-struction. In this regard, proposing playful and creative writing strategies, which involve writ-ing accompanied by drawing, may prove to be an action that supports the language acquisition process, as the playful element of creative text encourages L2 learners to play with language and take risks in a nonjudgmental context. An action-research study, aiming to investigate the impact of creative writing of short texts on L2 Italian acquisition, involved four Arabic-speaking girls in a six-month Italian as a Second Language empowerment workshop. Through a diachronic analysis of the texts written by the girls, it was possible to observe the evolution of the participants’ interlanguage, noting a gradual approximation to the Italian standard. The evi-dent improvement in handwriting, spelling, and morphology suggests that creative writing of short texts may be a good practice to implement in classes teaching Italian as a second language.Keywords: short stories, creative writing, Italian L2, Arabic-speaking, afterschool.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects children’s comprehension and production of spoken language without any known biomedical condition. The importance of early identification of DLD is widely acknowledged. Several studies have explored DLD predictors to identify children needing further diagnostic investigation. Most of these measures might be problematic for young children and bilingual children. Based on literature reporting fragile rhythmic abilities in children with DLD, in our study, we followed a different approach. We explored how non-linguistic measures of rhythmic anticipation can be gathered by means of advanced information technology and used to identify children at risk of DLD. With this aim, we developed MARS, a web-based tool to collect such data in a playful way and to analyze them using Machine Learning. MARS engages children in rhythmic babbling exercises, records their vocal productions, and analyzes the recordings. We discuss the methodological rationale of MARS and its underlying technology, and we describe a preliminary study with N = 47 children with and without DLD. The analysis of the audio features of participants’ rhythmic vocal productions highlights different patterns in the two groups. This result, although preliminary, suggests that MARS could be a valuable tool for early DLD assessment.

In this article, we analyze five reduced structures in Italian that display morphological agreement between their past participle and their internal argument. Three of the five structures have full illocutionary force despite lacking the middle field and the left periphery. We explain this fact (and the differences with the two remaining participial structures) by extending to object agreement cases Chomsky’s (2019) hypothesis that clauses are exocentric but can be labeled by a mechanism of feature sharing. This goes against the hypothesis that all reduced structures interpreted as clauses must be elliptical.

I dati statistici evidenziano che l’Italia, rispetto ad altri Stati membri dell’Unione Europea, presenta un tasso di abbandono scolastico superiore alla media europea, con particolare disparità tra studenti italiani e stranieri. Dato preoccupante poiché le scuole italiane presentano un numero sempre più elevato di studenti e studentesse con un retroterra migratorio. Spicca dunque l’importanza di formare gli insegnanti ad accogliere i bisogni e a sfruttare le risorse di questo nuovo bacino d’utenza. A tal proposito, attraverso una scoping rewiev, volta ad esplorare il nesso tra dispersione scolastica e migrazione, è emerso che una formazione che sappia abbracciare una prospettiva translinguistica e multilingue possa rivelarsi una strategia vincente per affrontare le sfide della dispersione scolastica

Listeners use linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming words, but not all do so to the same extent. While we know that monolingual children use prediction during spoken language processing from a young age and that adult L2 speakers may sometimes be slower, very few studies have focused on bilingual or multilingual children. Moreover, previous research suggests that literacy boosts anticipation in spoken language processing, but this has not been tested yet in bi/multilinguals. We investigated linguistic prediction and its relation to reading and vocabulary skills in 38 eight- to twelve-yearold bilingual and multilingual children who speak different heritage languages and Italian as the majority language, in comparison to 32 agematched monolingual Italian children. Using a visual world eye tracking method, we tested children's ability to anticipate nouns based on morphosyntactic cues (gender- and number-marked articles) in Italian. The results show efficient prediction in both groups, although monolinguals were faster than bi/multilinguals. While we found a positive relation between predictive language processing and reading in monolingual children, there were no reliable effects in bilingual and multilingual children. Future work is required to better understand the relation between prediction and literacy in this population.

The present paper focuses on pseudopartitive constructions headed by quantifier, collective, or container nouns (like a lot of senators, a group of students, a bottle of pills) followed by a singular or a plural verb. We compared these structures with superficially similar adnominal structures of the form NP1[−PL] prep NP2[PL] (e.g., the level of the lakes is/are) in Italian in an acceptability judgment study (Experiment 1), a forced-choice task (Experiment 2), and an eye tracking reading study (Experiment 3). Two major findings were consistent across all studies. First, verb agreement in pseudopartitives always patterned differently from controls. Second, albeit an overall preference for singular verbs was observed, a gradient difference emerged between adnominal controls and pseudopartitives, and among pseudopartitives headed by different nouns. We explain such variability in terms of the availability of a measure interpretation (e.g., pills in the measure of a bottle vs. a bottle containing pills) which is linked to the type of the pseudopartitive’s head noun. While in non-pseudopartitive adnominal structures only one parse is allowed by the grammar, in pseudopartitives a given head noun may admit or block a structural configuration in which the plural feature of the embedded constituent (e.g., of students, modifying a group) can determine the plurality of the subsequent verb. We conclude that verb agreement in pseudopartitives is a grammatical phenomenon and, as such, it refers to speakers’ grammatical competence and cannot be reduced to agreement attraction of the plural intervener.

Come indicato dall'articolo 165 del TFUE, la conservazione e la salvaguardia della diversità linguistica europea è un valore fondamentale della società europea. Visto l’aumento dei flussi migratori, che ha arricchito il panorama linguistico internazionale e nazionale, tale articolo pare ancora più fondamentale: alle minoranze linguistiche storiche dell’Italia, quali gli arbëreshë, i greci, i ladini, ecc. (MIUR, 2006) si sono aggiunte nuove comunità alloglotte provenienti dall’Africa, dal Sud-est asiatico e dall’Europa orientale. Le minoranze linguistiche devono essere accolte e tutelate in quanto tale processo promuove l’accesso all’istruzione e contribuisce all’acquisizione della seconda lingua (Hall, Cook, 2012). Pertanto, l'ipotesi che le lingue seconde siano meglio insegnate e apprese senza l'uso della lingua degli studenti pare fallace (Wahlstrom, 2015), in quanto il riconoscimento del capitale linguistico individuale e il suo uso come trampolino di lancio per l'acquisizione di competenze nella lingua della scuola producono esiti accademici migliori (Moinolnolki, Han, 2017). Tuttavia, quali sono le strategie di valorizzazione della lingua materna che possono essere sfruttate per incentivare l’acquisizione della lingua seconda? Attraverso una ricerca esplorativa di tipo qualitativo (Creswell, 2009), questo articolo si propone di mostrare alcune osservazioni empiriche e teoriche iniziali derivanti da un anno di lavoro sul campo. Presso il servizio ABC del Quartiere, 5 ragazze arabofone sono state coinvolte in un processo di alfabetizzazione in italiano che valorizzava la loro lingua madre. In conclusione, dall'osservazione partecipante e dall’analisi del materiale testuale prodotto dalle partecipanti, si ipotizza che la valorizzazione della lingua prima nel processo di scrittura di storie brevi abbia favorito uno spazio di benessere e incoraggiato la produzione scritta autonoma delle ragazze.

Relative clauses are subordinate clauses acting as nominal modifiers. They can be finite or nonfinite in Romance languages, with finite relative clauses largely more productive and widespread across varieties. Relative clauses contain a position interpreted anaphorically to the modified noun phrase (NP) that can correspond to a gap (as in most standard varieties) or to a resumptive pronoun, as in Romanian and in many substandard varieties. In most Romance languages, relative clauses are introduced either by the invariant element che/que or by some relative pronoun (il quale/lequel/el cual . . .) depending on the grammatical function of the variable it refers to.

Background: The comprehension profile of people with agrammatism is a debated topic. Syntactic complexity and cognitive resources, in particular phonological short-term memory (pSTM), are considered as crucial components by different interpretative accounts. Aim: To investigate the interaction of syntactic complexity and of pSTM in sentence comprehension in a group of persons with aphasia with and without agrammatism. Methods & Procedures: A cohort of 30 participants presenting with aphasia was assessed for syntactic comprehension and for pSTM. A total of 15 presented with agrammatism and 15 had fluent aphasia. Outcomes & Results: Linear nested mixed-model analyses revealed a significant interaction between sentence type and pSTM. In particular, participants with lower pSTM scores showed a reduced comprehension of centre-embedded object relatives and long coordinated sentences. Moreover, a significant interaction was found between sentence type and agrammatism, with a lower performance for passives within the agrammatic group. Conclusions & Implications: These results confirm that pSTM is involved in the comprehension of complex structures with an important computational load, in particular coordinated sentences, and long-distance filler gap dependencies. On the contrary, the specific deficit of the agrammatic group with passives is a pure syntactic deficit, with no involvement of pSTM.

This paper examines the diachrony of two neoclassical prefixes in Italian, namely semi- (from Latin sēmi- ‘half’) and para- (from Ancient Greek parà close to’), based on data extracted from corpora. The diachronic analysis reveals that until the 20th century, both the prefixes semi- and para- were mostly used in scientific terminology, where they conveyed their original meanings: degree and spatial proximity respectively. A cursory synchronic analysis based on data extracted from two newspaper corpora shows that in the last decades, semi- and para- have been productively used to express evaluative values (i.e., attenuation and approximation). The present study enriches the literature on the sources of approximating morphological markers and the relationship between attenuation and approximation, considered here as two distinct values placed along a continuum.

Negli ultimi decenni, molte ricerche hanno investigato l’uso del priming sintattico come metodo per esplorare la produzione e la comprensione di specifiche strutture linguistiche. L’obiettivo di questo elaborato è fornire prove a supporto del fatto che diverse versioni di un training morfosintattico basato sul priming, da noi sviluppato, possono avere effetti di priming cumulativi e a lungo termine, considerando diverse strutture sintattiche complesse della lingua italiana, sia su bambini monolingui a sviluppo tipico, sia su bambini con Disturbo Primario del Linguaggio (DPL) e su bambini che imparano l’Italiano come seconda lingua. Anzitutto, i nostri risultati hanno confermato le nostre previsioni per cui la produzione delle strutture indagate, ossia i pronomi clitici oggetto di terza persona e le frasi passive, è ritardata nei bambini che imparano l’Italiano come seconda lingua rispetto ai bambini monolingui di pari età (Capitolo 3 e 4), così come hanno confermato che la mancata produzione dei pronomi clitici oggetto è un marker clinico del DPL nei bambini di lingua italiana (Capitolo 2). Inoltre, abbiamo anche trovato che mentre i bambini con DPL producono significativamente più pronomi clitici oggetto quando il loro genere grammaticale corrisponde a quello del soggetto della frase rispetto a quando i due elementi sono marcati con un genere grammaticale diverso (un risultato trovato anche nei bambini a sviluppo tipico), i bambini che imparano l’Italiano come seconda lingua producono significativamente più pronomi clitici oggetto quando tali pronomi sono espressi con il genere maschile, rispetto a quando sono di genere femminile. Dopodiché, ci siamo concentrati sul nostro obiettivo principale, ossia la verifica che il training da noi sviluppato sia in grado di migliorare la produzione di queste strutture nei bambini valutati. Abbiamo inoltre verificato se tali miglioramenti potessero persistere anche dopo diversi mesi, cosa che proverebbe che lo strumento, In the last decades, much research has been devoted to the investigation of syntactic priming as a method to explore the production and comprehension of specific linguistic structures. With this dissertation, we aimed at providing evidence that different versions of a morphosyntactic priming-based production-focused training program, which we developed, can have cumulative long-term priming effects, considering different Italian complex syntactic structures, not only on monolingual typically developing children but also, most importantly, on children with Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) and early second language learners of Italian. First, our results confirmed our assumption that the production of the investigated structures, namely third person direct object clitic pronouns and passive sentences, is indeed delayed in early second language children with respect to their monolingual aged-matched peers (Chapters 3 and 4), as well as the fact that the failure to produce object clitics is a clinical marked for DLD in Italian-speaking children (Chapter 2). Moreover, we also found that the children with DLD produced significantly more object clitics when their gender marking matched that of the sentence’s subject with respect to when the two elements were in gender mismatch (a result also found in the typically developing children). In comparison, the early second language children produced significantly more object clitics when they were masculine marked than when they were feminine marked. Then, we focused on our main aim, which was to assess if the training program we developed could enhance the production of the aforementioned structures in the investigated children. We also verified if those enhancements would persist over several months, which would prove that the instrument can have cumulative long-term priming effects. Moreover, for the passives investigated in Chapter 4, we also evaluated whether not only the production but also the comprehension of the s

Well-established analyses of even claim that the contribution of this scalar-additive particle to the sentences in which it appears is of both an additive and a scalar inference [1], [2], [3]. Sentences with scalar-additive particles not only entail the corresponding sentences without the particle. They also imply that at least one among the associate’s [4] focus alternatives satisfies the predicate under consideration, and that the alternative(s) at issue are somewhat ordered [5]. When even appears under negation, this ordering gets reversed. As far as Italian is concerned, the perfect correspondent of even is held to be persino [6]. However, other particles can trigger the additive and scalar inferences in a similar way. Among these, pure and anche, and their negative counterparts neppure and neanche [7], [8], [9], [10]. At present, little experimental work has been carried out on Italian focus particles. To our knowledge, only one study has been conducted on the processing of persino [11]. Hence, it is yet to be determined whether the strength of the scalar inference may remain constant across different particles. We thus designed a multiple-choice cloze test targeting persino-persino...non, pure-neppure and anche-neanche. We first presented participants with a drawing and a short story and then asked them to fill in a concluding sentence choosing one of these six particles provided as alternatives (Figure 1). The pictures and stories were ideated to make participants build some expectations about which of the three characters presented was the most or least likely to carry out the action described – an action which could eventually be either successfully accomplished or failed by all. In this way, we aimed at observing whether the rate of particle selection may vary depending on which character the concluding sentence focusses on and, possibly, on the outcome of the stories. Via within-subject manipulation of Particle Polarity (positive-negative) and Focussed Ch

In this paper, we analyze five reduced structures in Italian that display morphological agreement between the past particle and the internal argument. Three out of the five structures have full illocutionary force despite lacking the middle field and the left periphery. We explain this fact (and the differences with the two remaining participial structures) by extending to object agreement cases Chomsky’s (2019) hypothesis that clause are exocentric but can be labeled by a mechanism of feature sharing. This goes against the hypothesis that all reduced structures interpreted as clauses must be elliptical.

Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the “auditory scaffolding hypothesis”), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals’ ability to acquire rules of different computational complexity in a visual artificial grammar learning task using sequential stimuli. As a group, deaf participants succeeded at all levels of the task; Bayesian analysis indicates that they successfully acquired each of several target grammars at ascending levels of the formal language hierarchy. Overall, these results do not support the auditory scaffolding hypothesis. However, age- and education-matched hearing participants did outperform deaf participants in two out of three tested grammars. We suggest that this difference may be related to verbal recoding strategies in the two groups. Any verbal recoding strategies used by the deaf signers would be less effective because they would have to use the same visual channel required for the experimental task.

In this paper, we present two experimental studies on the co-speech Mano a Tulipano (MAT), a gesture that is extensively used by native speakers of Italian and that typically accompanies interrogative speech acts. While there is broad consensus, in both the descriptive and the more formal literature, that MAT has a question meaning, there is no consensus on what kind of question is conveyed or marked by this gesture. Some researchers argue that co-speech MAT is ambiguous and can occur with both canonical and non-canonical questions. Other researchers have argued that MAT is presuppositional in nature and is only compatible with non-canonical questions. To test the hypothesis that MAT is fully compatible with non- canonical questions only, we conducted two acceptability judgment studies in which the participants’ task was to evaluate the appropriateness of the MAT gesture associated to two types of questions: a canonical question (i.e., a context in which, according to the presuppositional account of MAT, the presupposition is not satisfied), and a non-canonical (biased) question. We ran a binary forced-choice sentence evaluation task (Study 1) and a gradient acceptability judgment study (Study 2) to test if and at which rate Italian participants accepted the MAT gesture accompanying canonical questions. Our results show that MAT is fully acceptable only when the presupposition that the question is non-canonical is satisfied, compatibly with the presuppositional account. When this presupposition is not supported by the context, judgments on MAT were more variable across participants when a binary judgment was requested (Study 1); moreover, MAT received intermediate ratings by all the participants when a gradient judgment was required (Study 2).

In this paper, we present two experimental studies on the co-speech Mano a Tulipano (MAT), a gesture that is extensively used by native speakers of Italian and that typically accompanies interrogative speech acts. While there is broad consensus, in both the descriptive and the more formal literature, that MAT has a question meaning, there is no consensus on what kind of question is conveyed or marked by this gesture. Some researchers argue that co-speech MAT is ambiguous and can occur with both canonical and non-canonical questions. Other researchers have argued that MAT is presuppositional in nature and is only compatible with non-canonical questions. To test the hypothesis that MAT is fully compatible with non- canonical questions only, we conducted two acceptability judgment studies in which the participants’ task was to evaluate the appropriateness of the MAT gesture associated to two types of questions: a canonical question (i.e., a context in which, according to the presuppositional account of MAT, the presupposition is not satisfied), and a non-canonical (biased) question. We ran a binary forced-choice sentence evaluation task (Study 1) and a gradient acceptability judgment study (Study 2) to test if and at which rate Italian participants accepted the MAT gesture accompanying canonical questions. Our results show that MAT is fully acceptable only when the presupposition that the question is non-canonical is satisfied, compatibly with the presuppositional account. When this presupposition is not supported by the context, judgments on MAT were more variable across participants when a binary judgment was requested (Study 1); moreover, MAT received intermediate ratings by all the participants when a gradient judgment was required (Study 2).

On the comprehension of reflexive si in preschool Italian-speaking children The derivation of passive structures is known to be complex, which is why a full and productive mastery of passives appears cross-linguistically relatively late in development (around age 5-6) [1],[2],[7]. In Italian, production and priming experiments have shown that at the age of 5, children produce si-causative constructions in answering patient-oriented questions, a condition in which adults systematically opt for full (copular/periphrastic) passives [3],[4]. Interestingly, the same experimental setting has also led young children to use reflexive structures [1],[4]. This behaviour appears to contradict the robust conclusion that, by age 3-4, children master reflexive binding and thus do not misinterpret sentences with reflexives [6],[7]. Alternatively, as proposed by the “reflexive passive hypothesis” [5], these reflexive constructions attested in development may in fact represent first attempts at producing passives, via exploitation of si as an (impersonal-generic) middle/passive morpheme, rather than as a reflexive, thus overextending a grammatical option available in the target language. With a view at verifying the “reflexive passive hypothesis” [5], we created a sentence-picture matching task as 2AFC task targeting comprehension of reflexive structures in contexts that can be ambiguous between a reflexive and a middle/passive reading of the sentence containing si. Specifically, couples of pictures involving the same characters and the same verbal action were presented to children. However, in one case, the action was depicted as reflexive; in the other, it was represented as transitive. Participants were told to look at the pictures and to select the one corresponding to what the experimenter said – which was always a reflexive prompt. An example of experimental item is provided in Figure 1. Binomial logistic regression analyses in an intercept-only model with item as random inter

The European Union has set as one of the European Education Area initiative’s goals the promotion of an inclusive high-quality education. In pursuance of its aims the EU has acknowledged the relevance of the promotion of language learning and the creation of a multilingual community (EU). The importance and challenge of a multilingual mind was observed not only from a bureaucratic point of view, but also and especially from an academic perspective; over the years, more and more researchers (E.g., Volterra e Taeschner, 1978; Genesse, 1989; Romaine, 1995; Guasti, 2007; Atkinson, 2011) have conducted studies on bilingual development at an early age. Nevertheless, the creation of a multilingual and multicultural scenario raises some obstacles; in a country, such as Italy, which, in the last quarter of the 20th century, experienced an accelerated spread of the national language that led from a situation of widespread dialect monolingualism, to extensive bilingualism and in recent years back to a common Italian monolingualism (Berruto, 2021), offering an efficient pedagogical approaches and foreign language teaching methods represents a challenge to overcome. The problem of foreign language teaching grows even more complicated at pre-school age. When working with young children, rather than carrying out a traditional didactic second language teaching and learning method, which may lead to stress associated to the second language, it might be more efficient to nurture a positive attitude towards foreign languages through the implementation of a Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach. Ellis (1994), Arnold (1999) and Daloiso (2009) have noted that negative emotions related to the second language acquisition proses might jeopardize the language performance and, therefore, the creation of a multilingual mind. On the other hand, Coyle (2006) claims that a CLIL approach can motivate both language learners and teachers (ivi.), becoming a strategy for exploring d

This article investigates the emerging affix -iota in Italian, whose development is related to the morphological reanalysis of the word italiota as a blend of italiano 'Italian' and idiota 'idiot'. Based on data extracted from a web corpus, the analysis addresses the morphological properties of blends containing the adjective -(id)iota and the usage contexts of italiota, focusing on the semantic fields of its collocates. We found that blends with both -(i)diota and -iota are productive and that -iota displays affix-like properties and a derogatory meaning, especially in political discourse. This study confirms that the parts of blends belonging to extra-grammatical morphology (Dressler 2000; Mattiello 2018) can undergo a change that leads them to acquire affix-like properties and get closer to more regular morphology.

Mentre processiamo il linguaggio sfruttiamo indizi linguistici per anticipare le parole; tuttavia, i parlanti bilingui possono essere più lenti dei parlanti nativi nella loro seconda lingua (L2) ed essere soggetti all'influenza della loro prima lingua (L1) (Kaan & Grüter, 2021; Pickering & Gambi, 2018). Sappiamo che i bambini monolingui utilizzano l'elaborazione predittiva fin dalla giovane età (Mani & Huettig, 2012), ma ad oggi pochissimi studi si sono concentrati sui bambini bilingui (Brouwer et al., 2017; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019). In questa tesi vogliamo colmare questa lacuna, indagando come l’elaborazione linguistica predittiva in diversi gruppi di bambini bilingui sia influenzata dalla dominanza linguistica, dall'influenza cross-linguistica e dall'alfabetizzazione dei parlanti. Il lavoro presenta diversi studi sperimentali condotti mediante la registrazione dei movimenti oculari in contesto visivo per verificare se i bambini bilingui sono in grado di anticipare il nome in una frase sfruttando gli indizi di genere e numero sull’articolo che lo precede. Lo studio 1 ha testato l'elaborazione dell’indizio morfosintattico di genere e l'influenza cross-linguistica nei bilingui tedesco-italiano con diversi livelli di competenza linguistica nelle due lingue (N = 63, età 6-9); lo studio 2 ha testato l'elaborazione dell’indizio di numero in italiano e in inglese in bambini italiani frequentanti una scuola bilingue italo-inglese (N = 36 , età 7-8); lo studio 3 ha testato l'effetto delle differenze linguistiche sull'elaborazione degli indizi di genere e numero nei bilingui sequenziali arabo-italiano e mandarino-italiano rispetto ai controlli monolingui (N = 78, età 8-12); infine, lo studio 4 ha esplorato la relazione tra lettura e predizione nei bambini italiani multilingui e monolingui (N = 70, età 8-12). Nel complesso, i nostri risultati mostrano che i bambini bilingui anticipano i nomi sulla base di indizi morfosintattici, sebbene in alcuni casi risultino più lent, Listeners use linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming words, but bilingual speakers may sometimes be slower when tested in a second language (L2), and they may experience cross-linguistic influence from their native language (L1) (Kaan & Grüter, 2021; Pickering & Gambi, 2018). We know that monolingual children use predictive processing from a young age (Mani & Huettig, 2012), but to date very few studies have focused on bilingual children (Brouwer et al., 2017; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019). This dissertation aims to fill this gap, by investigating to what extent linguistic prediction in different groups of bilingual children is influenced by language dominance, cross-linguistic influence and literacy. We created different visual world eye-tracking experiments to test whether children would anticipate nouns on the basis of preceding gender and number cues. Study 1 tested gender processing and cross-linguistic influence in German-Italian bilinguals with varying dominance profiles (N = 63, age 6-9), Study 2 tested L1 and L2 processing of number in Italian early L2 learners of English (N = 36, age 7-8), Study 3 tested the effect of linguistic differences on gender and number processing in Arabic- and Mandarin-Italian sequential bilinguals compared to monolingual controls (N = 78, age 8-12), and Study 4 explored the relation between reading and prediction in multilingual and monolingual Italian children (N = 70, age 8-12). Overall, our results show that bilingual children anticipate nouns on the basis of morphosyntactic cues, although in some cases they were slower than monolingual peers when tested in a non-native or non-dominant language. This was the case especially when children had to rely on a grammatical feature was absent in their L1, or when they experienced cross-linguistic influence due to gender incongruency. With respect to literacy, we found a relation between reading and prediction for monolingual children but not for multilingual children. A possible reason for

This study investigates linguistic prediction based on grammatical gender in Italian-German bilingual children aged six to ten, using a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. Children listened to sentences while looking at objects that either matched or mismatched in grammatical gender, and that varied with respect to cross-linguistic gender congruency. To explore the effect of language dominance on processing, we tested children in bilingual schools in Italy and Germany, with an experiment in Italian (N=63) and in German (N=25). Results show rapid predictive processing, as children anticipated nouns based on the grammatical gender of articles. Furthermore, in the Italian task (but not in the German task), children exhibited a ‘gender congruency effect’, i.e., they showed cross-linguistic influence when the grammatical gender of the two languages did not overlap, leading to delayed anticipation. In contrast to previous research, this effect was also observed in simultaneous bilingual children. Both the extent to which children relied on predictive processing and the likelihood of a gender congruency effect were related to children’s language dominance, operationalized as relative language proficiency in terms of vocabulary knowledge.

In a previous study, our research group investigated the expression of irony in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and suggested that specific manual and non-manual markers signaled the signer’s meaning and attitude. The present research aimed at expanding those findings by analyzing whether these markers are used in irony recognition and whether they are language-specific. We designed an experiment in which we compared recognition of ironic remarks out of context considering three groups of Italians: Deaf signers, hearing signers, and hearing non-signers. Our aim was to verify whether the manual and non-manual markers we associated with the expression of irony in LIS constitute a reliable cue to detect irony and whether these cues were accessible to signers more than to non-signers sharing the same cultural background. Although the ironic intent in LIS was accessible also to hearing non-signers, we found, among hearing participants, that knowledge of LIS does improve accuracy in recognizing ironic remarks in LIS. This suggests that signers’ facial expressions and bodily movements do not solve a purely affective function, but are grammaticalized, at least to some degree.

This paper presents a new diachronic corpus of the Italian language, i.e., CODIT (COrpus Diacronico dell’ITaliano ‘Diachronic corpus of Italian’). After a description of the corpus design, the second part of the article is devoted to show possible applications of the corpus in the morphological field, specifically in the domain of evaluative morphology. We highlight the corpus’ strengths and limitations through the diachronic analysis of two affixes, i.e., sopra- and -oide. The study contributes to shed light on the dynamism of evaluative morphology by focusing on the loss of the intensification function suffered by sopra- and the emergence of an approximating value that currently affects -oide., Cet article présente un nouveau corpus diachronique de la langue italienne : CODIT (COrpus Diacronico dell’ITaliano « Corpus diachronique de l’italien »). Après une description du corpus, la deuxième partie de l’article est consacrée à montrer les applications du corpus dans le domaine morphologique, en particulier dans le domaine de la morphologie évaluative. Nous soulignons les forces et les limites du corpus à travers l’analyse diachronique de deux affixes, sopra- ‘sur-’ et -oide ‘-oïd’. L’étude contribue à éclairer le dynamisme de la morphologie évaluative en s’intéressant à la perte de la fonction d’intensification subie par sopra- et à l’émergence d’une valeur d’approximation qui affecte actuellement -oide.

We report an experiment addressing the comprehension of LIS interrogatives in three adult populations with different times of exposure to sign language: native signers, early signers, and late signers. We investigate whether delayed exposure to language affects comprehension of interrogatives and whether there is an advantage for subject dependencies over object dependencies, as systematically reported for spoken languages. The answer to the first question is positive: there is evidence that natives outperform nonnative signers, confirming permanent effects of delayed exposure to sign language even decades after childhood. However, the performance in subject interrogatives was lower than in object interrogatives in all groups of participants. We discuss several possible reasons for this unexpected finding.

This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed in Donati and Cecchetto 2011 and Cecchetto and Donati 2015 falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever-relatives introduced by a phrase (ev-er+NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This reply reports the findings of four controlled experiments in English and Italian and discusses five properties that set free relatives apart from full relatives (occurrence with a complementizer, occurrence with a relative pronoun, infinitival use, absolute use, adverbial use). Crucially, ever+NP relatives do not pattern like free relatives in any of these five domains, either in Italian or in English. This clearly shows that ever-relatives are not a counterexample to D&C’s phrase structure theory. Another potential counterexample, Romanian free relatives, is also discussed. As for ever+NP relatives, in Italian they are shown to be garden-variety headed relatives, while in English they are headed relatives that involve a D-to-D movement that is responsible for the syntactic formation of the complex determiner what+ever.

This study investigates Italian blending from a synchronic perspective, based on data extracted from a dictionary of neologisms attested over the past two decades. The first part of the paper addresses the boundaries between blends and other morphological units. Neologisms in which at least one of the two constituents has undergone a shortening have been classified into three categories (i.e., compounds with combining forms, secreted affixation, and blends), and described according to a set of semantic and formal parameters. The second part of the paper provides an updated description of Italian blending by analyzing a sample of 200 blends. The analysis reveals that Italian blends exhibit a wide variety of structures, according to the parameters of linearization, shortening, and overlap. Overlap, along with the phonological resemblance, proved to be a factor that favors blend formation. Moreover, it is shown that although blending in Italian is an irregular mechanism overall, in rare cases (such as that of -iota from idiota ‘idiot’), a blend's part may acquire regularity and affix-like properties.

Questo volume raccoglie una serie di scritti in omaggio alla memoria di Francesco Aspesi (Gallarate 14-1-1938 - ivi 25-10-2020), un caro amico e un prezioso collega, scomparso dopo una breve ma impietosa malattia. Gli interventi toccano molti dei suoi ambiti di interesse: lingui­stica generale e storica; linguistica camito-semitica e indeu­ropea; contatto linguistico, sostrato mediterraneo, labirinti; filologia biblica, papirologia. Tra le lingue trattate: antico egiziano, ebraico biblico, ivrit, “Jewish languages” (giudeo-provenzale, giudeo romanesco, yiddish), arabo, berbero, italiano, latino, greco, sanscrito vedico, paleosardo. Contributi di: Anna Angelini, Emanuele Banfi, Erica Baricci, Maria Patrizia Bologna, Guido Borghi, Vermondo Brugnatelli, Anna Linda Callow, Gioachino Chiarini, Carlo Consani, Francesco Dedè, Vittorio Dell’Aquila, Mario Enrietti, Frederick Mario Fales, Sara Ferrari, Stefano Franchini, Renato Gendre, Gabriele Iannaccaro, Leonardo Magini, Maria Mayer Modena, Mario Negri, Erika Notti, Alex Passi, Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Massimo Poetto, Sergio Ribichini, Alessandro Roccati, Claudia Rosenzweig, Alberto Moshe Somekh, Stefano Struffolino, Massimo Vai, Giuseppe Zanetto., A collection of studies in memory of Francesco Aspesi (14-1-1938 - 25-10-2020). Main subjects ar: general and historica linguistics; Afroasiatic and Indo-european linguistics; Languages in contact; Mediterranean substratum; Labyrinths; Biblical philology; Papyrology. Contributors: Anna Angelini, Emanuele Banfi, Erica Baricci, Maria Patrizia Bologna, Guido Borghi, Vermondo Brugnatelli, Anna Linda Callow, Gioachino Chiarini, Carlo Consani, Francesco Dedè, Vittorio Dell’Aquila, Mario Enrietti, Frederick Mario Fales, Sara Ferrari, Stefano Franchini, Renato Gendre, Gabriele Iannaccaro, Leonardo Magini, Maria Mayer Modena, Mario Negri, Erika Notti, Alex Passi, Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Massimo Poetto, Sergio Ribichini, Alessandro Roccati, Claudia Rosenzweig, Alberto Moshe Somekh, Stefano Struffolino, Massimo Vai, Giuseppe Zanetto.