The acquisition of English by young Italian learners: A corpus study on the influence of transfer

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the role of Italian in the acquisition of English, and asks the following research question: Is there evidence of transfer errors from L1 Italian to L3 English in the writings of children collected in the LEONIDE corpus? The focus is on the usage of articles, modal verbs, and lexical verbs. The annotated texts included in this learner corpus are analysed with the use of the ANNIS corpus tool. Mistakes are counted and evaluated based on the differences between English and Italian (e.g., Maiden & Robustelli, 2007; Proudfoot & Cardo, 2013; Herring, 2016) and on the results of previous research (e.g., Duguid, 2001; Ionin et al., 2008; Rocca, 2007). The mistakes are compared to those made by slightly younger L1 learners of English with the help of the Lancaster Corpus of Children’s Project Writing (LCCPW). This thesis concludes that some of the errors made by the participants can be traced back to influences from L1 Italian. Such mistakes include the overuse of the definite article the, the overuse of the modal verb must, and the use of the verb make where native speakers might use the verbs do or have. However, other mistakes such as the omission of the third person -s morpheme are not necessarily due to transfer from Italian; rather, these are common errors for all learners of English. The absence of certain modal verbs and do-support, furthermore, can be explained by the fact that the participants are beginning learners. The comparison with L1 learners did not yield many insights, as these participants made very few mistakes. Further research could focus on a comparison between the Italian participants and even younger L1 learners to find out which mistakes are caused by transfer and which mistakes are common for all learners of English. In addition, a comparison with learners from other language backgrounds could clarify the difference between generic language learning mistakes and transfer errors.