The relativisation strategies in the production of Maltese advanced learners of Italian L2

This study investigates the relativisation strategies used by advanced Maltese learners of Italian as a second language (L2), with particular focus on the acquisition and processing of restrictive relative clauses. Drawing on Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), the research examines how Maltese learners negotiate the structural differences between Maltese and Italian relative clause formation, especially the contrast between resumptive pronouns in Maltese and gap strategies in Italian. The study combines corpus analysis, questionnaire data, and an experimental forced-choice task adapted from Beltrama and Xiang (2016) to analyse the interlanguage of learners across different proficiency levels. Particular attention is given to syntactic islands, long-distance dependencies, pied piping, and resumptive pronoun usage in complex embedded structures. The findings demonstrate that proficiency level, exposure to Italian input, and frequency of syntactic structures significantly influence both production and processing. Advanced learners showed near-native behaviour in the comprehension and production of complex relative clauses, including sensitivity to island effects and the use of repair strategies comparable to those employed by native speakers. The research contributes to second language acquisition studies by integrating theoretical syntax, psycholinguistic experimentation, and interlanguage analysis. It highlights the interaction between formal instruction, naturalistic exposure, and implicit grammatical knowledge in the development of advanced L2 competence. More broadly, the study provides new insights into how bilingual Maltese learners acquire complex morphosyntactic structures in Italian and how interlanguage systems evolve toward native-like attainment despite post-pubertal language acquisition in formal educational settings.