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11.
Prosodia e Foreign Accent - Prosody and Foreign Accent : Prominenza accentuale e deaccentazione in Italiano e Tedesco come lingue seconde
Alessandra Zappoli, 2012, master's thesis

Abstract: This thesis investigates the production and acquisition of prosodic contours in Italian learners of German, and German learners of Italian as second languages (L2). The thesis compares speech production in L2 with speech production in the native language (L1). The goal is to verify whether the speech production in L2 is affected by Transfer phenomena that are linked to the phonological properties of the L1. The thesis also tests, in light of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis, whether the direction of acquisition - the acquisition of German as L2, being an L1 speaker of Italian vs. the acquisition of Italian as L2, being an L1 speaker of German – can predict a production in L2 connotated by Foreign Accent (FA). The thesis describes: i) the current state of the art of acquisitional theories of an L2 in adulthood; ii) the theoretical description of the patterns of prosodic prominence in Italian and German within the Autosegmental Theory of Intonation framework; iii) the interaction of the phonological structure with the Information Packaging of the Discourse Structure that differently affects the realization of prosodic patterns in Germanic and Romance languages. Finally, the thesis reports the preliminary results of a production experiment that adopts the paradigm of Swerts et. al (2002) in which participants utter a sequence of Noun-Phrases composed by a Noun and Adjective in which the Information Status rotates between the conditions of New, Given, and Contrastive information. The data highlight the presence of H+L* as the most frequently used Pitch Accent in the production of Italian speakers, that emerges also in the production of the German L2 speakers of Italian; in contrast, the data show the presence of Deaccentuation in the production of L1 speakers of German in correlation with the Given information status of a referent that is not successfully acquired by Italian L1 speakers of German as L2. The data indicate that it appears to be easier to successfully acquire the Italian prosodic system, being a native speaker of German, than vice-versa, supporting the MDH. The facilitatory effect is explainable by the less relevant role of the Discourse Structure in guiding the prominence patterns in Italian, which more heavily relies on the phonological structure, resulting in a less marked prosodic system compared to the prosodic system of German.
Keywords: pitch accents, prosody, foreign accent, prominence, second language acquisition, german, Italian, markedness, speech production
Published in RUNG: 06.12.2021; Views: 1845; Downloads: 0
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12.
English L2 in Italy : the role of the teacher in acquiring a second language
Greta Mazzaggio, 2016, unpublished conference contribution

Keywords: English, L2, language acquisition
Published in RUNG: 23.09.2021; Views: 1598; Downloads: 0
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13.
L'uso dell'inglese L2 e la correzione degli errori in due lezioni alla scuola media : laurea in lingue e letterature straniere
Greta Mazzaggio, 2012, undergraduate thesis

Abstract: In our globalized and multi-cultural society, communicating between different nationalities becomes more and more important. Language remains a paramount aspect of cultural dialogue and English as lingua franca is the undisputed medium of communication, taught everywhere at an early age. In Italy English is taught since elementary school, sometimes even in kindergarten, when children’s linguistic abilities are stronger; however, teachers usually fail to make the most out of such abilities, as their lessons are primarily in Italian and the use of English is limited to some words or expressions targeted by exercises. With such an input, the children’s progress is likely to be limited. My experiment attempts to assess the interaction student-teacher in terms of use of L2 in class by means of a comparative analysis of two middle-school lessons taught by the same teacher to different age groups. Moreover, teacher’s correction techniques will be assessed in the light of frameworks established by scholars in this field, where the positive value of errors in the development of children interlanguage emerges with clarity. Since feedback is an essential part of education, special attention was paid to the teacher’s behavior in dealing with student’s mistakes. Two entire lessons were recorded and transcribed, counting the numbers of words and turns uttered respectively by students and the teacher. When collected and analyzed, such data exhibited both similarities and differences between classes. On the teacher’s side, both lessons revealed that she adopts a rather conservative style of teaching, with limited interaction. As a result, the lessons are to be considered teacher-oriented, for the distribution of turns and the amount of words exchanged; conducted along the textbook’s lines, they offer very limited room for creative language production. Moreover, the teacher’s tendency to steadily correct the students, with the only exception of pronunciation errors, impairs student’s communicative fluency at large. However, a certain progress may be observed between the 1st and 3rd class in both the increased command of English and the number of errors, decreased by almost 50%. In both cases, though, the production of English sentences is creative only for a minimal part, as English is often read and lessons are mostly based on the correction of homework and written exercises. In conclusion, the experiment offers data that confirm several assumptions of contemporary linguistics, particularly in the field of Second Language Acquisition and Error Analysis.
Keywords: Second Language Acquisition, Error Analysis, Italian, English as L2
Published in RUNG: 22.09.2021; Views: 1825; Downloads: 0
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14.
Uso dell'inglese L2 e correzione degli errori : corpus di due lezioni alla scuola secondaria di primo grado
Greta Mazzaggio, 2016, original scientific article

Abstract: L’obiettivo di questo studio è quello di portare nuovi dati al sempre vivo dibattito riguardante l’analisi degli errori durante la produzione linguistica in una lingua diversa da quella materna. Sono state analizzate con metodo contrastivo due lezioni svolte dalla medesima docente in due classi alla scuola secondaria di primo grado (qui per brevità scuola media): una lezione con alunni del primo anno e una con alunni del terzo anno. Si sono studiate le percentuali del parlato, sia dal punto di vista delle differenze docente-discente, sia da quello delle differenze prima-terza. Si sono cercate, inoltre, conferme delle teorie che vedono i docenti spesso intenti a correggere eccessivamente i discenti, a discapito della fluenza comunicativa.
Keywords: second language, foreign language, english as a second language, acquisition, errors
Published in RUNG: 20.09.2021; Views: 1759; Downloads: 48
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15.
Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: guess which one is easier
Francesca Foppolo, Greta Mazzaggio, Francesca Panzeri, Luca Surian, 2021, original scientific article

Abstract: Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children’s performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children’s pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 3;8-9;2) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four- and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures.
Keywords: acquisition of pragmatics, scalar implicatures, ad-hoc implicatures, experimental pragmatics
Published in RUNG: 17.09.2021; Views: 1739; Downloads: 0
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16.
Developmental aspects of Maximize Presupposition : a view from Slovenian
Penka Stateva, 2021, published scientific conference contribution abstract (invited lecture)

Abstract: In this talk I present the results of an experimental study of young children's acquisition and use of the principle Maximize Presupposition (MP) in the context of the propositional attitude predicates (equivalent to) know and think. MP operates in the domain of pragmatics in order to distinguish among semantically equivalent propositions which have different presuppositional load in a given context (Heim 1991, Sauerland 2008). Given its nature, demonstrating a speaker’s sensitivity to MP is contingent on knowledge about presuppositional content within a relevant set of alternatives. We use a felicity judgement task to test the ability of 5- and 7-year-old Slovenian-speaking children to derive the factive presupposition of know and the pragmatic inference trigerred by think in accord with MP. The older group of children outperformed the younger group in both conditions manifesting a ceiling performance, while the younger group showed a more mixed pattern. Our results suggest that the anti-factivity inference is mastered on a par with the ability to derive the presupposition of factivity, as predicted by contemporary pragmatic theories. The discussion will also include questions about the influence of bilingualism on developing pragmatic abilities, negative transfer in the domain of pragmatics and its dependence on cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic variation among translational equivalents.
Keywords: Maximize Presupposition, implicated presupposition, early bilingualism, language acquisition, attitude verb
Published in RUNG: 15.09.2021; Views: 1977; Downloads: 49
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17.
Developmental aspects of Maximize Presupposition: a view from Slovenian
Penka Stateva, invited lecture at foreign university

Abstract: n this talk I will present the results of an experimental study of young children's acquisition and use of the pragmatic principle Maximize Presupposition in the context of the propositional attitude predicates (equivalent to) know and think. We use a felicity judgement task to test the ability of 5- and 7-year-old Slovenian-speaking children to derive the factive presupposition of know and the pragmatic inference trigerred by think in accord with Maximize Presupposition. The older group of children outperformed the younger group in both conditions manifesting a ceiling performance, while the younger group showed a more mixed pattern. Our results suggest that the anti-factivity inference is mastered on a par with the ability to derive the presupposition of factivity, as predicted by contemporary pragmatic theories. The discussion will also touch upon questions about the influence of bilingualism on developing pragmatic abilities, negative transfer in the domain of pragmatics and its dependence on cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic variation among translational equivalents.
Keywords: Maximize Presupposition, language acquisition, attitude verbs, Theory of Mind
Published in RUNG: 06.05.2021; Views: 2171; Downloads: 0
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18.
Do children derive exact meanings pragmatically? Evidence from a dual morphology language
Franc Marušič, Rok Žaucer, Amanda Saksida, Jessica Sullivan, Dimitrios Skordos, Longlong Wang, David Barner, 2021, original scientific article

Abstract: Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies “one, and not two”. To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., “a button”) when their language features an immediate “successor” that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English-speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.
Keywords: Acquisition of quantity expressions, Acquisition of exactness, Pragmatics of grammatical number, Inferences on quantity, Dual, Slovenian
Published in RUNG: 13.12.2020; Views: 2339; Downloads: 0
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19.
Do children use language structure to discover the recursive rules of counting?
Rose M. Schneider, Jessica Sullivan, Franc Marušič, Rok Žaucer, Priyanka Biswas, Petra Mišmaš, Vesna Plesničar, David Barner, 2020, original scientific article

Abstract: We test the hypothesis that children acquire knowledge of the successor function — a foundational principle stating that every natural number n has a successor n + 1 — by learning the productive linguistic rules that govern verbal counting. Previous studies report that speakers of languages with less complex count list morphology have greater counting and mathematical knowledge at earlier ages in comparison to speakers of more complex languages (e.g., Miller & Stigler, 1987). Here, we tested whether differences in count list transparency affected children’s acquisition of the successor function in three languages with relatively transparent count lists (Cantonese, Slovenian, and English) and two languages with relatively opaque count lists (Hindi and Gujarati). We measured 3.5- to 6.5-year-old children’s mastery of their count list’s recursive structure with two tasks assessing productive counting, which we then related to a measure of successor function knowledge. While the more opaque languages were associated with lower counting proficiency and successor function task performance in comparison to the more transparent languages, a unique within-language analytic approach revealed a robust relationship between measures of productive counting and successor knowledge in almost every language. We conclude that learning productive rules of counting is a critical step in acquiring knowledge of recursive successor function across languages, and that the timeline for this learning varies as a function of count list transparency.
Keywords: Cross-linguistic Count list Successor function Natural number concepts Number acquisition Conceptual development
Published in RUNG: 05.01.2020; Views: 3200; Downloads: 0
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20.
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