A first recognition of the acquisition of articles in Spanish L3 by Italian students with English L2

Abstract

The work focuses on the acquisition of articles in Spanish as L3 by university Italian beginners having a B2 level in English as L2. The latter answered a questionnaire involving definite and indefinite articles, so that for every question the participants had to choose between two options in Spanish, one following the syntax of Italian L1 and the other one that of English L2. In this way, we wanted to explore the language that students looked at when acquiring Spanish L3. Our results support the Typological Primacy Model outlined by Rothman 2011, which suggests that during the acquisition process typological and psycho-typological factors are crucial.

Keywords

• corpus analysis
• L3 acquisition
• Spanish L3
• cross-linguistic influence