Nonword pluralization: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in Albanian-Italian and Romanian-Italian bilingual children

The present study reports about the administration of a Wug Test (specifically, a nonce word pluralization task) to two groups of bilinguals and a group of monolingual (control) children, aimed at assessing the morphological abilities of bilinguals w.r.t monolinguals and to evaluate the role of language similarity between the L1 (Albanian or Romanian) and the L2 (Italian). The results confirmed our expectations about the enhanced morphological skills of bilinguals in the Wug Test, adding further evidence to the stream of studies discussed in the introduction and, more specifically, validating the results obtained by Vender et al. (2018) concerning Italian inflectional morphology. Interestingly enough, this bilingual effect seems to hold independently of language similarity, since no significant differences were found between the performances of the bilingual groups in any of the conditions.