Abstract
Recent research on third or additional language (L3) acquisition highlights unique phenomena beyond second language acquisition. This study examines receptive aural competence in early morpho-syntactic structures among primary school L3 English learners in a bilingual (Italian-German) area of Italy from teachers’ and Processability Theory (PT) perspectives. PT proposes that learner interlanguage goes through a series of set stages before the morpho-syntactic elements of those stages may be incorporated into procedural memory. Data from two learner groups (N = 126), categorised according to age and hours of L3 English input, were collected using a picture selection task to assess the development of early grammatical structures in young learners, then ordered using implicational scaling and analysed against the proposed PT framework. A further dataset examines teachers’ perceptions of the order in which learners acquire those grammatical structures. In the light of results showing some PT-compatible systematicity in aural comprehension of the targeted morphosyntactic elements, the article discusses perceptions of acquisitional order of grammar and their degree of alignment with PT’s predictions.