Attitudes and Language Acquisition: an investigation on the Italian-French community in Aix-Marseille

The doctoral research here presented explores the relationship between social attitudes and spontaneous L2 acquisition in a sample of Italian-French migrants. As to answer the research question, a specific protocol was developed, integrating methods borrowed from both social psychology (implicit and explicit attitudes’ psychometrics) and sociolinguistics (speech elicitation and analysis). Regarding this last point, a crucial aspect of the data collection phase has consisted in constructing a wide bilingual corpus, representing the L1 and L2 varieties characterizing the informants’ repertoires. The modular interview elicitation mode selected for the Italian speech elicitation, in addition, has made the corpus a valuable source of social, psychosocial, and historical information about the condition of the contemporary Italian migrants in France. The comparative analysis of the collected psychosocial and linguistic datasets highlights interesting relationships between social attitudes and L2 development, significantly varying according to the involved stereotypical dimension (warmth or competence) and construct’s nature (explicit or implicit).