Italian as L2 in Romanian pre-schoolers

Evidence from a perception and production task

Abstract

Following state-of-the-art research on the linguistic development of children acquiring a second language, the proposed study aims at deepening our understanding of the mechanisms that drive the phonetic and phonological acquisition of Italian as L2 in migrant Romanian pre-school children. By shedding some light on the difficulties faced by a group of 17 Romanian pre-schoolers in Italian L2 production and discrimination tasks, our aim is to provide evidence of their phonological development to support potential educational intervention activities that suit the needs of multilingual children. Moreover, though on a limited sample of children, we provide important evidence that needs to be taken into account when carrying out diagnostic language evaluations and treatments on bilingual children born to immigrant parents.