This chapter evaluates the Elicited Imitation (EI) test as a tool to assess learners’ morpho-syntactic processing abilities. Within the VILLA project, the treatment of the nominative/accusative opposition by 17 Italian L1 initial learners of Polish L2 is observed on the one hand in an EI test paired with a comprehension test and on the other hand in free production. The EI test regularly elicits more accurate output than free production. We argue that this is not because learners simply repeat strings of sounds with no underlying processing but because of the lower communicative pressure exerted by the structured task. Although EI is not equivalent to spontaneous production, it may well represent a good compromise between ecological validity and practicality.

This paper presents an overview of existing research on intercomprehension among Slavic languages and gives a few suggestions for the future development of this field of studies. Particular attention is devoted to the language constellations comprising Polish. After an introduction to the historical and sociological context of present-day Poland, characterized by the massive immigration of speakers of East Slavic languages, the text presents a succinct review of existing research and puts forward a few suggestions to fill knowledge gaps. It is argued that the large-scale acquisition of L2 Polish by speakers of related languages offers great opportunities for the scientific study of intercomprehension. The resulting insights in turn can be usefully applied to the development of efficient language teaching methods aiming to facilitate and accelerate the integration of Slavic-speaking refugees into Polish society.

This paper examines word formation strategies in initial SLA, with particular regard to implicit processing of the distributional properties of the input. 163 learners with various L1s and no experience of the target language took a 14-hour L2 Polish course under controlled input conditions. In an oral production task, learners were asked to describe properties of human referents who had never appeared in the input by stating their nationality or profession. In their output, learners most often referred to the target referents by attaching a -k(-) sound cluster to a lexical morpheme borrowed from a known language. Quantitative analysis shows that indeed, within the input considered, the same -k(-) cluster is characteristic of most words referring to human entities. The study concludes that learners can analyse the morphological structure of target words even after minimal exposure to the input, identifying at first the derivational formants characterised by the strongest association to the intended meaning.

This paper describes the results of a research project aiming to document the acquisition sequence of a set of L2 Polish morphosyntactic structures. In order to verify the hypothesis that acquisition sequences are largely independent of the learner’s L1, data were collected among two groups of learners, i.e. speakers of typologically and genetically distant languages relative to Polish, on the one hand, and speakers of East Slavic languages (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian), on the other hand, all of which are lexically and grammatically very close to the target language. Data were obtained through a survey and an Elicited Imitation Task.While Slavic learners systematically achieved higher performance than their non-Slavic counterparts, the acquisition sequences of the two groups proved to a large extent comparable. These results suggest an interaction between a general processing advantage deriving from a close relation between the L2 and one’s L1, on the one hand, and universal acquisition constraints, on the other hand.

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