Morfosintassi e situazione comunicativa in varietà di apprendimento iniziali: un confronto tra interazione semi-spontanea e test strutturati

This study aims to verify the the impact of task type on the observable morphosyntactic competence of initial learners. Within the Italian edition of the VILLA project, 17 Italian L1 learners with no experience of the target language took part in a 14-hour Polish course taught by a native speaker, whose speech was planned, recorded and transcribed in order to correlate the development of the interlanguage with the characteristics of the input.
The study considers the results of a comprehension test and a repetition test, designed to verify whether learners can process grammatical meaning (AGENT vs. PATIENT) based on inflectional morphology (NOMINATIVE vs. ACCUSATIVE), whose role was probed by manipulating constituent order (SO vs. OS). In addition, we also analyse learner semi-spontaneous peer interaction in which transitive structures comparable to the targets of the tests were produced.
The results show that only those learners who scored above chance on both SO and OS targets in both the comprehension and the repetition test were able to structure their semi-spontaneous output according to a morpho-syntactic principle. All others relied on a default SO word order and animacy contrasts; nonetheless, communication proved fully effective. These results confirm that task type indeed has a strong effect on learner morphosyntactic
competence; in addition, the specificity of the database employed makes it possible to generalise these findings even to the very earliest stages of language acquisition.