Thesis title: La produzione di frasi relative in bilingui italiano/coriglianese: il ruolo dell’input.
Several studies within the fields of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics have highlighted how inviduals’ language skills are influenced by both internal and external factors for L1 and L2 development, including chronological age, age of first exposure to input and frequency of usage of L1 and L2 (Luk & Bialystock, 2013; Unsworth, 2016). When it comes to the acquisition of dialects as either L1 or L2, additional variables come into play, such as the sociolinguistic status of the varieties under investigation (standard vs. non-standard language), the structural proximity between L1 and L2 and speakers’ perception of the co-existence of these closed related varieties within their own linguistic repertoire (Berruto, 2011a; Leivada et al., 2017). The study aimed at investigating the syntactic development of 85 Italian-Coriglianese (Northern Calabrian dialect) school-aged bilinguals (7-18 years old) in both Italian and Coriglianese. A narrative production task (LITMUS-MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012; 2019), a sentence-repetition test (Del Puppo et al., 2016), a grammaticality judgment task and a translation task were employed to assess comprehension and production of subject, object and prepositional relative clauses by three groups of participants (Group 1, Group 2, Group 3). A sociolinguistic questionnaire (BALED Project Questionnaire, Mattheoudakis et al., 2016) was used to examine participants’ sociolinguistic background and to analyse the role of chronological age and current usage of Italian L1 and Coriglianese L2 on their linguistic development. This joint investigation of participants’ implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge revealed an asymmetry between their comprehension and production skills in dialect as L2. Linear regression analysis showed how lower levels of proficiency in Coriglianese were due to younger age and rare resort to dialect for daily communication. Nevertheless, a qualitative analysis of relativization strategies employed by both younger and older participants in Italian L1 revealed a widespread difficulty regarding comprehension and production of pied-piping relatives (Comrie & Kuteva, 2013). Data suggested how both syntactic complexity (Friedmann et al., 2009; Kayne, 1994) and low rates of frequency of prepositional relatives in spontaneous speech (Cerruti, 2016a, 2016b; Guasti & Cardinaletti, 2003) might explain participants’ difficulties with these structures. The study provides a foundation for further research aimed at exploring Italian-dialect bilingualism and advocates for a mixed-method approach for the study of the acquisition and use of Italo-Romance dialects as both L1 and L2.