Manipolazione dell’input e elaborazione della morfologia flessionale

This contribution evaluates the effects of input manipulation on the accuracy of case ending perception by initial Italian L1 learners of Polish L2. Within the VILLA project, two groups of participants took a 14-hour Polish course whose input differed in whether learners’ attention was drawn to specific features of the target grammar (form-based vs. meaning-based).
A Sentence Imitation test was used to verify if learners’ accuracy in producing the correct inflectional marker would be affected by the target ending, the target sentence constituent order and the stem lexical transparency. As hypothesised, the meaning-based group proved sensitive to all parameters; the form-based group, on the other hand, only showed an effect for ending. It is argued that input manipulation reduces learners’ sensitivity to the stimulus, prompting them to rely more explicitly on their interlanguage grammar.