The Acquisition of Italian

The Acquisition of Italian
Author: Adriana Belletti
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027268533

A major contribution to the study of language acquisition and language development inspired by theoretical linguistics has been made by research on the acquisition of Italian syntax. This book offers an updated overview of results from theory-driven experimental and corpus-based research on the acquisition of Italian in different modes (monolingual, early and late L2, SLI, etc.), as well as exploring possible developments for future research. The book focuses on experimental studies which address research questions generated by linguistic theory, providing a detailed illustration of the fruitful interaction between linguistic theorizing and developmental studies. The authors are leading figures in theoretical linguistics and language acquisition; their own work is featured in the research presented here. Students and advanced researchers will benefit from the systematic review offered by this book and the critical assessment of the field that it provides.

Input Processing and Processing Instruction

Input Processing and Processing Instruction
Author: Alessandro Benati
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2021-09-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027259054

Input Processing is a theoretical framework on which the pedagogical paradigm called Processing Instruction is predicated. In this book, new data on the acquisition of Italian and Modern Standard Arabic are presented and analyzed within this framework. Each study in the book explores how input processing strategies affect the acquisition of a particular linguistic feature and/or structure in the two languages. The studies use both offline (e.g., sentence and discourse-level tasks) and online tests (e.g., eye-tracking) to measure the effects of this instructional training.

Prosodic and Rhythmic Aspects of L2 Acquisition

Prosodic and Rhythmic Aspects of L2 Acquisition
Author: Anna De Meo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-02-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443846856

In recent years, prosodic competence has become increasingly important in second language acquisition studies, as it is a crucial element in the identification of non-native pronunciation and message understanding. This volume is the first attempt to provide a survey of interlanguage prosody research in L2 Italian. It begins with an overview of the possible approaches to the study of rhythmic-prosodic skills acquisition in an L2. The second part of the book emphasizes the relationship between the mother tongue and a second language, and investigates the presence of transfer in prosody interlanguage development. The third part illustrates prosody’s role in the interpretation of pragmatic meaning in native-non-native interaction, and its influence on message persuasiveness. And in the fourth part, technology meets prosody in the areas of second language teaching and speech synthesis.

The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages

The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages
Author: Vincent Torrens
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027253013

This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, Inflection, wh-movement, rssumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, topic and focus, and null arguments.

Child Second Language Acquisition

Child Second Language Acquisition
Author: Sonia Rocca
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027241467

As one of the first books in child second language acquisition (SLA), this book focuses on the core area of tense-aspect morphology, reporting on three L1-Italian children learning L2 English vs. three L1-English children learning L2 Italian. An innovative longitudinal/bidirectional research design, where two languages represent both source and target, show effects of language transfer in learners that, because of their age, still have potential to become native-speakers of the target. An unusual feature of this book is that relevant studies of acquisition of L2 Italian, some heretofore only in Italian, are reviewed, incorporated into the study and made available to a more general audience. Though the main focus is on child SLA, crucial comparisons to both first language acquisition vs. adult SLA are presented. This approach will thus be of interest more generally to readers in first and second language acquisition and child development.

The Acquisition of Gender

The Acquisition of Gender
Author: Dalila Ayoun
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2022-01-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027258392

Gender as a morphosyntactic feature is arguably “an endlessly fascinating linguistic category” (Corbett 2014: 1). One may even say it is among “the most puzzling of the grammatical categories” (Corbett 1991: 1) that has raised probing questions from various theoretical and applied perspectives. Most languages display semantic and/or formal gender systems with various degrees of opacity and complexity, and even closely related languages present distinct differences, creating difficulties for second language learners. The first three chapters of this volume present critical reviews in three different areas – gender assignment in mixed noun phrases, subtle gentle biases and the gender acquisition in child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish – while the next six chapters present new empirical evidence in the acquisition of gender by bilingual children, adult L2/L3 learners and heritage speakers of various languages such as Italian, German, Dutch or Mandarin-Italian.

The Acquisition of Diminutives

The Acquisition of Diminutives
Author: Ineta Savickien?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2007-01-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292892

This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection.

The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance

The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance
Author: Angela Nuovo
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004208496

This work offers the first English-language survey of the book industry in Renaissance Italy. Whereas traditional accounts of the book in the Renaissance celebrate authors and literary achievement, this study examines the nuts and bolts of a rapidly expanding trade that built on existing economic practices while developing new mechanisms in response to political and religious realities. Approaching the book trade from the perspective of its publishers and booksellers, this archive-based account ranges across family ambitions and warehouse fires to publishers' petitions and convivial bookshop conversation. In the process it constructs a nuanced picture of trading networks, production, and the distribution and sale of printed books, a profitable but capricious commodity. Originally published in Italian as Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998; second, revised ed., 2003), this present English translation has not only been updated but has also been deeply revised and augmented.

Learning to Read and Write

Learning to Read and Write
Author: Margaret Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 1999-05-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780521621847

For many years, the development of theories about the way children learn to read and write was dominated by studies of English-speaking populations. As we have learned more about the way that children learn to read and write other scripts - whether they have less regularity in their grapheme-phoneme correspondences or do not make use of alphabetic symbols at all - it has become clear that many of the difficulties that confront children learning to read and write English specifically are less evident, or even non-existent, in other populations. At the same time, some aspects of learning to read and write are very similar across scripts. The unique cross-linguistic perspective offered in this book, including chapters on Japanese, Greek and the Scandinavian languages as well as English, shows how the processes of learning to read and spell are affected by the characteristics of the writing system that children are learning to master.

Tense and Aspect in Italian Interlanguage

Tense and Aspect in Italian Interlanguage
Author: Zuzana Toth
Publisher: de Gruyter
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783110624960

The expression of time is fundamental in communication and languages have developed a variety of means to encode temporal relations. When learning a new language, learners are often faced with the challenging task of discovering a new system of temporal relations. The present study investigates the development of tense and aspect marking in the interlanguage of L3 Italian learners enrolled in university language courses. It examines how the tense-aspect system develops in the interlanguage and how the acquisition process is shaped by factors such as the lexical aspectual value of the predicates and discourse grounding. The data indicate that both lexical aspect and discourse grounding influence the distribution of verbal morphology in the interlanguage. Semantically congruent pairings of lexical aspect, verbal morphology and discourse grounding are used more frequently and appropriately than less prototypical combinations. The acquisition process is also influenced by the learner's L1, which was mostly German in the context of the present study. The study can be used as a guide for curricular decisions in language teaching, and for projecting further research on the development of tense-aspect marking in multilingual learners.