Bilingualism and multilingualism in the area of Naples: the development of auxiliaries in immigrant children’s narrations”

Our study focuses on the longitudinal acquisition of Italian by twelve immigrant children having different languages as hereditary languages. Many of them were born in Italy or arrived in this country very young. They live in Naples and were interviewed with respect to a range of narrative tasks with no written or audio-oral texts, some of which used in famous international projects (Frog, where are you by M. Meyer). According to the task, the subjects either shared or did not share information with their listener. They were observed for minimally a year and maximally 4 years, during which the same tasks were reproposed every month and a half approximately. We analyzed the verb morphology with respect to the Italian auxiliaries essere (‘to be’) and avere (‘to have’), by means of which the passato prossimo – a type of analytical perfect tense that Italian children acquire first – is formed. We observed the development of the two auxiliaries with both transitive and intransitive verbs. We adopted a functionalist theoretical framework (Berman & Slobin 1994) and Sorace’s (2000) gradient model for split intransitivity. We investigated the possible interference with the heritage languages of the informants but also the possible similarities with the path followed by Italian children and adult foreign learners. We will demonstrate that our children do not necessarily follow the implicational scale described by Sorace, that they have a contact with the way monolingual children and adult learners of Italian develop auxiliation but that they also follow a developmental pattern of their own.