'I think mangio might be passe simple': exploring multilingual learners' reflections on past tense verb morphology

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N= 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language and in Italian, were analysed using a qualitative content analysis. From the analysis categories and subcategories emerged, and their occurrences served to display group tendencies. Four categories (explicit rules, intuition, other languages and uncertainty/unknown), and seven subcategories were found and their occurrence was differently distributed across groups. Further, the reflections of the learners became more sophisticated as proficiency in Italian increased. In fact, the reflections progressively incorporated different layers of information connected to explicit knowledge about tenses: temporal, aspectual and, finally, lexical, that is, the inherent semantics of the predicates. Finally, while the reflections of low-proficiency learners referred to different L2s (e.g. English and French), high-proficiency learners made comparisons with Swedish more consistently, regardless of their proficiency level in the Romance language. These results are discussed in the light of research on second/additional language learning of aspectual distinctions in Romance languages.