Jacopo Torregrossa

Jacopo Torregrossa
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Jacopo verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Jacopo verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Goethe University Frankfurt · Institut für Romanische Sprachen und Literaturen

Doctor of Philosophy
Professor of Multilingualism and Second Language Acquisition, Goethe University Frankfurt

About

50
Publications
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369
Citations

Publications

Publications (50)
Article
Full-text available
Empirical studies on bilingual children’s reference production have often focussed on comparisons with monolingual peers. In this study, we introduce the concept of ‘reference profiles’: Speakers may exhibit similar or different behaviours in reference production, independently of whether they belong to a specific group (e.g., monolinguals or bilin...
Article
Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) have been extensively used as measures of bilinguals' language abilities. Most studies relied on SRTs in which the target sentences were not connected to each other. However, participants' performance may differ if these sentences are embedded in discourse, since discourse provides participants with additional cues...
Article
Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek–Italian bilingual children (8–11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using accepta...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies on heritage language (HL) acquisition investigate a single linguistic structure, showing how language exposure or cross-linguistic effects affect its acquisition. Here, we consider HL speaking children's mastery of several linguistic structures using a cloze-test. We examine how their language competence is affected by language expo...
Chapter
This study examines the extent to which the VSO word-order is accepted in Italian by Greek-Italian bilingual children, considering that this word-order is possible in Greek and dispreferred in Italian. Furthermore, it investigates whether children's acceptability rate of VSOs in Italian modulates the possibility to prime children's production of th...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, several studies have suggested that Null Subject Languages (NSLs) do not exhibit uniform behaviour in all respects. This paper aims to determine whether the interpretation of null and overt subject pronouns in Spanish differs from that in two other NSLs: Italian and Greek. To this end, we replicated the sentence interpretation expe...
Article
Full-text available
In this study we tested the comprehension of Subject Relative Clauses (SRCs) and Object Relative Clauses (ORCs) by Spanish monolingual children aged 4-6. Our results provide novel evidence that a subject-object asymmetry holds true also for Spanish: SRCs are easier than ORCs. Moreover, the test of different types of ORCs revealed that both overt Di...
Chapter
Full-text available
Certain linguistic structures are more challenging than others for bilingual speakers. This is true across different languages and language combinations. In this paper, we propose an account in terms of different types of linguistic complexity. Our argumentation derives from the results of a study based on a cloze test including 40 different lingui...
Article
Full-text available
Most studies on the acquisition of postverbal subjects (VS) in L2 Italian focus on a limited number of linguistic factors that tend to be associated with the production of VS in L1 (e.g., verb class and subject discourse status). Moreover, they analyze homogeneous groups of learners in terms of proficiency, mostly through controlled experiments. In...
Chapter
This paper investigates reference production by bilingual and monolingual children. We focus on the degree to which the activation of referents is encoded by different types of referring expressions among bilinguals and monolinguals. The study is based on forty-six story retellings produced in German by twenty-five Greek-German bilingual children a...
Chapter
It has been shown that Greek and Italian vary in the use of null subjects (Torregrossa, Bongartz & Tsimpli 2015; Torregrossa, Andreou & Bongartz, 2020): while Italian null subjects tend to refer to the subject of the preceding clause, Greek null subjects show a less restricted distribution. The aim of this study is to show how this cross-linguistic...
Article
This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent's antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong...
Article
The present paper aims to investigate how language use among families with a migrant background in Italy varies over time, focusing in particular on the distinction between daily communicative practices and literacy-related ones in each language of the family's linguistic repertoire. The study is based on the analysis of an extensive sociolinguisti...
Chapter
Full-text available
In this study we show that literacy exposure in the heritage language at home enhances children's theory-of-mind abilities
Article
Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax–discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax–discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are difficu...
Article
Full-text available
Basierend auf einer Studie mit 180 Kindern und Teenagern, die Portugiesisch als Herkunftssprache in der Schweiz sprechen, zeigt dieser Artikel, dass eine hohe Sprachkompetenz eines Kindes in seiner Herkunftssprache keinen negativen Einfluss auf seine Sprachentwicklung in der Mehrheits- bzw. Landessprache hat. Zudem wird aufgezeigt, dass die im herk...
Article
The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children’s narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children’s literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public pri...
Chapter
Based on the idea that translanguaging has positive effects on children’s metalinguistic abilities, this chapter presents some didactic activities fostering children’s understanding of the linguistic mechanisms underlying the formation of complex words. We show that children are able to formulate generalizations on the structure of complex words, b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Reference production is a complex task that requires keeping track of discourse referents and selecting discourse-appropriate referring expressions (REs). Whether an RE is appropriate depends on the status of the referent in discourse. The use of REs by bilingual children is subject to individual variation and it has been suggested that distinct co...
Article
Full-text available
The present study analyses written narratives of 60 Portuguese-German bilingual children between 8 and 15 years living in Switzerland, in both their languages. Portuguese is the children’s heritage language (HL) and German the environmental language. The analysis focusses on the children’s lexical, morphological and structural knowledge in the verb...
Preprint
Full-text available
Most studies on bilingual children’s metalinguistic awareness (MA) assess MA using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual’s languages dynamically interact with each other in the formation of metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) in their MA using acceptability-rating tasks in whi...
Article
Full-text available
O presente artigo apresenta os resultados de um estudo empírico sobre a competência bilingue de 180 crianças lusodescendentes, residentes em três áreas linguísticas da Suíça (alemã, francesa e italiana). Com recurso a um cloze test e a um questionário parental detalhado, os resultados mostram que o desenvolvimento do português, a língua de herança...
Chapter
How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the...
Article
Full-text available
This paper intends to provide some speculative remarks on how consistency and continuity in language use practices within and across contexts inform heritage language acquisition outcomes. We intend “consistency” as maintenance of similar patterns of home language use over the years. “Continuity” refers to the possibility for heritage language spea...
Article
The present study aims to understand which factors contribute to different patterns of use of referring expressions by bilingual children, by considering the triangulation between language experience and proficiency, executive functions and cross-linguistic effects. We analyze reference use in Greek in the context of a narrative elicitation task as...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies have observed that bilinguals tend to use and accept overspecified, redundant referring expressions in one of their two languages. This tendency has been mainly analysed as an effect of cross-linguistic influence (for instance, from a non-null-subject language to a null-subject one) or quantity and quality of language exposure. We a...
Article
Full-text available
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy...
Chapter
It has been shown that Greek and Italian vary in the use of null subjects (Torregrossa, Bongartz & Tsimpli 2015; Torregrossa, Andreou & Bongartz, submitted): while Italian null subjects tend to refer to the subject of the preceding clause, Greek null subjects show a less restricted distribution. The aim of this study is to show how this cross-lingu...
Article
We investigate reference production in bilingual children. Based on Kibrik (2011), we analyze the production of referring expressions in discourse in terms of activation of a referent. We propose a novel approach, which calculates activation by taking into account different activation-lending factors and their respective weight. This allows us to c...
Article
Full-text available
This paper intends to test different accounts of bilingual reference production against the production of referring expressions in Italian by German‒Italian bilingual adolescents. In particular, we investigate to what extent bilingual referring expressions involve transfer from one language to the other, result from processing and dominance variabl...
Chapter
This paper argues in favor of the hypothesis that contrast and focus are two independent categories of information structure (Neeleman & Vermeulen 2012). After showing that contrast and focus have a different semantics (Torregrossa 2015), I investigate whether they are associated with different prosodic representations. In particular, I will presen...
Article
Full-text available
The volume edited by Marina Chini serves as a forum for discussion among scholars working in interlanguage prosody and pragmatics. Pragmatics is understood here in a broad sense, encompassing the encoding of informational notions in sentence structure, categories of discourse management, and features of discourse interactions in educational setting...
Article
Several studies have revealed the cognitive and linguistic benefits of balanced bilingualism, but the research on balanced biliteracy is still in its initial stages (Marinis et al. submitted. “Biliteracy Education Impacts on Cognition Selectively.”). This study investigates the positive effects of balanced biliteracy on the development of secondary...
Chapter
This paper deals with the acquisition of reference by German monolingual children between the age of 8 and 10. In particular, we focus on the acquisition of the use of demonstrative pronouns (der, die, das) as compared to the use of personal pronouns (er, sie, es). We analyze the production of these referential expressions in the context of story-t...
Article
Full-text available
Focusing on the discourse conditions that license the use of null subjects (pro) in Greek and Italian, this paper shows that the distribution of referring expressions (RE, e.g., overt and null pronoun, clitic, definite description, etc.) does not only depend on the referents’ discourse status (alias accessibility). Syntactic constraints play an imp...
Chapter
In this paper I explore the semantic import of contrast as a category of information structure. It has often been noticed that contrast is associated with specific grammatical correlates and has an impact on sentence structure in different languages. However, it is still not clear how the semantic contribution of contrast differs from the one of fo...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper is concerned with low topics in the sentential left periphery. It builds on two main assumptions: i) postfocal material is right-dislocated (Samek-Lodovici 2006); fronted focus in Italian triggers a phonological process called "rippled effect of focus" (Zubizarreta 2010). First, I will provide experimental evidence in favor of the second...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper focuses mainly on negative polar questions. Following on from the relevant literature, we distinguish between two types of negative polar questions-those with inner negation and those with outer negation-showing that each is associated with specific morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Previous studies have revealed that there is a s...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper investigates the relationship between production and perception of suprasegmental features in L2, focusing on the acquisition of English polar question intonation by Italian learners. 30 ESL learners performed two tasks. One was used for the elicitation of English polar questions. The other was a discrimination task assessing the percept...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper investigates the semantics of Information focus and Contrastive focus in Italian. Throughout the literature, there have been some recent attempts to show that they both have the same semantic representation at LF. After arguing against these theories, I propose a semantic model for the interpretation of Information Focus and Contrastive...
Book
The dissertation deals with the encoding of discourse notions in sentence structure. Its aim is twofold: a) to elaborate a semantics for ‘topic’, ‘focus’ and ‘contrast’; b) to investigate how these three notions are coded in grammar. As for the former issue, it has been attempted to formulate definitions which could be able to identify each of the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Focusing on Italian, Japanese and English data, the paper investigates the linguistic nature of contrastive topics, showing that they are derived notions that stem from the interaction of two different informational units, i.e., topic and contrast, considered independently from each other. Thus, it will be argued against both those theories that vi...
Article
0. Overview of the study The idea that early productions are structured according to topic/comment configurations has often been held across the literature on child language ac-quisition. The present paper addresses three main lines of investigation: a) finding empirical support in favor of the above mentioned idea, overcoming the vagueness of the...

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