This cross-sectional study investigated the use of four verbal indices of social knowledge (personal pronouns, verb conjugations, people words and mental state language) and their concurrent relations in a sample of 287 Italian-speaking children between 18 and 36 months. Results showed that the production of all indices increased with age. Mental…

The Italian linguistic space has radically changed through the onset of the new millennium due to the presence of innovative multiple linguistic practices that have taken place as a consequence of deterritorialization processes. Furthermore, Latino diaspora in recent years have fostered the appearance of new forms of Global Spanishes (García and…

This article explores attitudes and response to language selection in advertising targeting Italian bilinguals who belong to a defined speech community. The research builds upon (i) research on multilingual advertising by investigating its attitudinal correlates, and (ii) studies on advertising to bilinguals through the verification of the…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

The majority of multilinguals immersed in different cultures report feeling different when switching languages. Although the influence of personality on self-perceptions has been investigated, little attention has been paid to acculturation aspects. The present study is based on a mixed-method approach combining questionnaire and interview data.…

The present paper investigates the relationship between objective ethnolinguistic vitality, individual networks of linguistic contacts (INLCs) and perceived vitality among German-speaking (N = 415) and Italian-speaking (N = 379) adolescents in South Tyrol, Italy. Supporting our hypothesis, we found that INLC has a greater effect on perceived…

This pilot study aims to highlight a) differences in pragmatic function and distribution of discourse markers (DMs) in computer mediated and face to face (FtF) settings and b) any correlation of DM uses and language competence. The data have been collected by video-recording and analysing three speakers of Italian L2 (language level competence:…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…