Non skrattare! : Tipologie di errori nella produzione orale di bambini italo-svedesi

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines the different typologies of morphosyntactic and lexical errors committed in speaking by bilingual Swedish-Italian children, 7-9 years old, having Swedish as first dominant mother tongue and Italian as first weak mother tongue. Furthermore, this work tries to assess if performance or competence errors are committed. Stated by Green, the bilinguals’ languages are organized in separate subsystems that can be activated to different extents. For the speakers analyzed here, the frequency of use of Swedish implies their predilection for this language, whose ease of access causes a predominance of the Swedish language system over the Italian one. According to the Competition Model, by improving the knowledge of Italian, the subjects adopt the linguistic structures that they gradually acquire and the transfers from the dominant to the weak L1 gradually decrease. The collection of data has been carried out taking into account the theories defining code-switching, code-mixing and slips of the tongue. As expected, the results show that performance errors are prevalent in children with a good knowledge of Italian, especially in the morpho-lexical field (terms not occurring automatically during the production and often drawn from Swedish). On the other hand, competence errors prevail in children with a poor knowledge of Italian: having a very weak ability of normative control and being subject to a very strong interference and mixture with Swedish at every level, they often borrow terms or sentences not occurring in Italian from the dominant language.