THE EFFECT OF PSYCHOTYPOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES TOWARDS TARGET LANGUAGE ON THE OCCURRENCE OF TRANSFER ON THE RECEPTIVE LEVEL UPON THE FIRST CONTACT OF CROATIAN SPEAKERS WITH ITALIAN AS L2

Psychotypology is one of the conditions for the occurrence of crosslinguistic influences. Following empirical findings, we conducted a study to establish the presence and the effect of psychotypology on the language transfer between Italian, as a foreign language, and the local speech of Split, as a variant of learners’ L1. Two target groups with no prior knowledge of Italian were questioned: one hundred students regularly in contact with the speech of Split and another hundred with no competence and no contact with it. The two groups took the Yes/No Vocabulary test. The aim was to reveal the initial comprehension of Italian vocabulary. Through the questionnaire, we gained insight into the intuitive behaviour of both groups of participants regarding the meaning of given Italian words, distance perceived, and subjective perception of the relationship between the Italian language and the speech of Split. The results of the two groups were compared using the quantitative test data. In addition, the relationship between psychotypology and a successful test outcome was thoroughly examined, according to the qualitative data. The results demonstrated an extremely high percentage of informants in both groups being aware of similarities between the two idioms at the lexical level. The findings indicated that participants who perceived the similarities as significant performed better on the test. The analysis of results showed that the experimental group found the Italian language easily comprehensible, whereas the control group defined it as somewhat demanding. Significantly better vocabulary test results of the experimental group confirmed that participant’s attitude is essential to achieve language transfer.