Accordo di genere e interferenza dell’italiano L1 nell’acquisizione del russo L2

This work is devoted to gender agreement errors in the interlanguage of L1 Italian learners of L2 Russian, two languages exhibiting partially overlapping gender systems and agreement patterns. The paper focusses on the effect of gender congruency, i.e. whether or not nouns are assigned the same gender in the L1 and the L2. Elements agreeing with incongruent nouns are hypothesised to occur in the L2 in the form required by the L1, producing such errors as *glubokaja bassejn ‘deep:nom. sg.f swimming pool(m):nom.sg’ along the model of It. profonda piscina ‘deep:sg.f swimming pool(f):sg’. 22 L1 Italian university students orally translated into Russian a set of Italian sentences containing nouns equally divided into congruent and incongruent. The paper examines agreement patterns considering four variables, i.e. gender congruency, participants L2 competence, POS and required gender of the agreeing element. Only the effect of gender congruency proved statistically significant.