Chapter 19. Morphological awareness in L2 Italian children with a migrant background

Research on morphological awareness in bilingual children has generated conflicting evidence, with studies reporting bilingual gains and others finding poorer performance relative to monolinguals. In this study, we explored further this issue by testing 54 school-aged children speaking Italian as an L2 on a broad domain of morphology and by means of nonword tasks, with the aim to reduce potential vocabulary effects on morphological abilities. One group of monolingual Italian-speaking children and two groups of bilingual L2 Italian children (with Romanian and Albanian as L1s) took part in the experiment. Results evidenced similar performances in most tasks, but limited underachievement was found in bilinguals, especially in the Albanian-Italian speaking children. This bilingual gap can be explained by the genealogical and typological distance between the L1 and the target language. Crucially, it disappears once vocabulary and exposure factors are taken into account.