The acquisition of ser and estar in Spanish by Italian university students

Abstract

This study aims to understand the acquisition of ser and estar by Italian L3 learners, a complex process since in Spanish, despite the literature, the interpretation of the two verbs is still elusive. Standard Italian as well as the Northern Italian varieties use only one copula, essere, whereas in Italian Southern varieties share with Spanish the distribution of the two copulas and their semantic interpretations. Given this difference in the vernacular variety of these Italian speakers we questioned whether knowing a Southern variety of Italian could facilitate the acquisition of Spanish as an L3. 60 Italian university students and 30 monolingual Spanish native speakers participated in the study. The learners were divided into four groups according to their geographical origin (Northern and Southern Italy) and their Spanish proficiency level (Intermediate and Advanced). Considering the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard, 2019), it is predicted that proficiency-matched learners from the Southern areas will significantly be more accurate in their uses of the copular verbs compared to the learners exposed to the Northern varieties. The participants completed a grammaticality judgement task and an elicited production task. Analysing the results in light of the recent linguistic theories on language transfer it emerged that the first prediction was not confirmed, suggesting that knowing a local variety or regional Italian does not affect the acquisition of an L3 in intermediate and advanced stages.