Attitudes and Language Acquisition

This volume investigates the role of attitudinal constructs in shaping second-language acquisition in migratory contexts, focusing on adult Italian migrants residing in the Aix-Marseille area and their phonetic production in French. Moving beyond purely structural accounts of L2 development, the study examines how socially grounded evaluations of the host community relate to measurable outcomes in speech.
Adopting an interdisciplinary framework that integrates sociolinguistics, experimental phonetics, and social psychology, the analysis brings together acoustic data and attitudinal measures to test the hypothesis that prosocial orientations toward the host group facilitate more native-like phonetic realization. The results provide a more differentiated picture: only explicit attitudinal dimensions systematically correlate with L2 outcomes, and they do so in divergent ways. Perceived Competence – associated with status and efficacy – emerges as a facilitating factor, correlating with greater convergence toward native targets, whereas perceived Warmth – reinterpreted in terms of social solidarity – with less native-like production.
These findings suggest that attitudinal constructs operate through distinct psychosocial mechanisms and that their effects on L2 acquisition are neither uniform nor unidirectional. More broadly, the study demonstrates that adult language development in contexts of mobility is deeply embedded in processes of social evaluation, identity negotiation, and intergroup positioning.