The Acquisition of Italian as the Second Language of Children with Mandarin or Arabic as First Language

In this article, we will discuss two aspects of bilingual acquisition: the mechanism of transfer and the time of actual exposure to the second language. The first consists in the fact that a linguistic property acquired in the first language (L1) can facilitate the acquisition of the same property in the second language (L2). In other words, when acquiring the L2, children can benefit from having already learned analogous properties in the L1. We will then discuss the importance of actual time of exposure in evaluating the acquisition of linguistic competencies. This can only be determined on the basis of detailed questionnaires investigating children’s linguistic environment. We will also talk about the questionnaires available for L2 Italian. To discuss these specific aspects of bilingual acquisition, we will examine some studies involving children with L2 Italian and L1 Arabic or Mandarin, two languages very different from each other. In the first case, we will focus on the acquisition of clitic pronouns which, being present both in Arabic and in Italian, can exemplify the mechanism of transfer. The comparison between the performance in Italian of Arabic-speaking children and that of children with other L1s shows that real exposure to the L2 plays a crucial role in the acquisition of clitics, as well as transfer. Subsequently, we will focus on the L2 Italian of children with L1 Mandarin, via examination of the acquisition of relative clauses and of grammatical number and gender. In these cases, we will also examine the facilitating role of transfer, but we will do so in two slightly different contexts. In the first case, the linguistic properties under scrutiny - i.e., relative clauses and grammatical number - are present in both languages. In the second case, instead, the linguistic aspect analysed - i.e., grammatical gender - is expressed only in one of the two languages, namely, Italian.