Cross-linguistic influence in the child third language acquisition of grammar: Sentence comprehension and production among Turkish-German and German learners of English

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 567-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Hopp
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Formal Models ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
German Children ◽  
The One ◽  
Turkish German

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This paper investigates the extent to which current formal models of third language (L3) grammatical acquisition extend to sequential child L3 acquisition. We examine whether heritage speakers learning a foreign language as an early L3 transfer grammatical properties from the heritage language or the dominant second language (L2). Design/Methodology/Approach: We used a sentence repetition task and a picture story retelling task. The tasks focussed on grammatical phenomena that were either different between English and German, that is, verb-second and adverb order, or between English and German, on the one hand, and Turkish, on the other, that is, verb-complement order as well as subject and article realization. Data and Analysis: We tested matched groups of 31 Turkish-German and 31 monolingual German children learning English in grades 3 and 4, and we compared sentence repetitions as well as oral sentence production across different grammatical phenomena using parametric statistics. Findings/Conclusions: In both tasks, the two groups perform indistinguishably from each other, and both groups show selective transfer of grammatical properties from German. These findings suggest L2 transfer from a typologically related language in sequential child L3 acquisition. Originality: This paper breaks new ground by testing the applicability of formal models of adult L3 acquisition of grammar to sequential child L3 learners. It uses aural comprehension and oral production tasks with carefully matched groups of L2 and L3 learners of English to isolate the source of grammatical transfer in L3 acquisition. Significance/Implications: The research advances our understanding of cross-linguistic influence and unravels the dynamics of grammatical transfer in early child multilingualism. It adjudicates between current models of transfer in L3 acquisition in a multiple-methods design, it shows that these models apply to early L3 acquisition of heritage speakers, and it highlights that these models need to be expanded to include factors such as dominance and proficiency in prior languages.

scholarly journals PERAN BAHASA INGGRIS SEBAGAI BAHASA KEDUA DALAM PEMEROLEHAN BAHASA INDONESIA SEBAGAI BAHASA KETIGA

Paramasastra ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Kholiq
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
Language Influence

Cross language influence in third language (L3) acquisition is related to the first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Cross-language influence in third language acquisition studies can be analyzed from the first and second language role in the third language acquisition. Each acquisition Indonesian language as L3 is always English as L2 so that the role of English in acquiring Indonesian as B3 be worth studying. It is a qualitative approach based research. This study focuses on (1) the role of English of articulation and (2) the role of English as the provider acquiring vocabulary in Indonesian as L3. Data used in this research is the conversation conducted by the researcher and research subject; and sentence production based on picture by the research subject. Data analysis result finds 1) the role of English as an addition to the mastery of the sound that is not owned B1 of pemeroleh Indonesian as L3 and English influence language sounds in pronunciation Indonesian, and 2) The role of English as a provider of vocabulary in language acquisition Indonesia as B3 is as a language bridge in language acquisition Indonesia if the Indonesian pemeroleh not master words in Indonesian. 

Cross-linguistic influence in unbalanced bilingual heritage speakers on subsequent language acquisition: Evidence from pronominal object placement in ditransitive clauses

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 1410-1430
Author(s):  
Eliane Lorenz ◽  
Richard J Bonnie ◽  
Kathrin Feindt ◽  
Sharareh Rahbari ◽  
Peter Siemund
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
English Word ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Third Language ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Turkish German

Aims and objectives: The main objective of this study is to find evidence for the Linguistic Proximity Model, which allows for facilitative and non-facilitative cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from all previously known languages in third language (L3) acquisition. We target CLI in L3 English based on bilingual heritage speakers (Russian-German and Turkish-German) in comparison with second language acquisition of monolingual German speakers. Methodology: We examine the outcome of an English word order test. The participants produced sentences based on randomly ordered words. The focus of this study is the placement of direct and indirect pronominal objects with varying ditransitive verbs. Data analysis: 195 students in school years 7 and 9, separated into three language groups, participated in the study: German monolinguals ( nG7 = 47; nG9 = 64), Russian-German bilinguals ( nR7 = 19; nR9 = 30) and Turkish-German bilinguals ( nT7 = 19; nT9 = 16). The placement of pronominal objects in the sentence task is compared to results from equivalent word order tests in English, German, Russian and Turkish that were repeated with native speakers. Findings: We find some support for the Linguistic Proximity Model because the outcome shows that facilitative and non-facilitative CLI is possible from both the heritage language and the majority language. Determining factors are the background languages, the age of the participants and frequency. However, the majority language, German, displays the strongest influence of both background languages due to its dominant status. Originality: This study provides further support for the Linguistic Proximity Model, by using a sentence completion task with unbalanced bilingual heritage speakers. Significance/implications: We provide evidence for showing that both facilitative and non-facilitative influence from all previously known languages of bilingual heritage speakers is possible and verifiable. We therefore add to the field of L3 acquisition and the discussion about current models of CLI.

scholarly journals VOICE ONSET TIME IN MULTILINGUAL SPEAKERS: ITALIAN HERITAGE SPEAKERS IN GERMANY WITH L3 ENGLISH

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Miriam Geiss ◽  
Sonja Gumbsheimer ◽  
Anika Lloyd-Smith ◽  
Svenja Schmid ◽  
Tanja Kupisch
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Bilingual Advantage ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence

Abstract This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and English as L3. The study aims to identify the extent to which the HSs produce distinct values across all three languages, or whether crosslinguistic influence (CLI) occurs. To this end, we compare the HSs’ voice onset time (VOT) values with those of L2 English speakers from Italy and Germany. The language triad exhibits overlapping and distinct VOT realizations, making VOT a potentially vulnerable category. Results indicate CLI from German into Italian, although a systemic difference is maintained. When speaking English, the HSs show an advantage over the Italian L2 control group, with less prevoicing and longer fortis stops, indicating a specific bilingual advantage.

L3 acquisition of German adjectival inflection: A generative account

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Jaensch
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Adjectival Inflection ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Syntactic Properties

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the ‘second language (L2) status factor’ hypothesis (Bardel and Falk, 2007), which proposes that the primacy of the L2 can block the potential positive effects that may be transferable from the first language (L1). This article attempts to extend these hypotheses to the domain of morphosyntax, in relation to the TLA of the properties of grammatical number and gender concord marking on German attributive adjectives; these properties not present in the L1 of Japanese, or the L2 of English. Two further factors are of interest in the current study; first, the performance of the learners according to their L3 and their L2 proficiency levels, a variable not discussed in the above-mentioned studies; and, second, the role that the type of task has on the performance of these learners. Three groups of Japanese native speakers (matched for proficiency within each German group), but with differing English proficiencies, completed a carefully balanced gap-filling task, together with two oral elicitation tasks in the form of games; both of these elicited tokens of adjectival inflection. Initial results offer partial support for weaker versions of the two hypotheses mentioned above. However, neither of the L3 models tested can fully account for the results obtained, which are more consistent with a feature-based account of the organization of grammar in the domain of morphosyntax, such as that of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993). DM is a model for language acquisition which — coupled with a view that the Subset Principle proposed by this account is not observed by non-primary language learners — has recently been proposed to explain the optionality observed in L2 learners’ production (Hawkins et al., 2006). The data presented here suggest that it could be extended to L3 learners’ production.

Turtles all the way down: Micro-cues and piecemeal transfer in L3 phonology and syntax

2020 ◽  
pp. 026765832094103
Author(s):  
John Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
The One ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence ◽  
The Way

There are several theories which tackle predicting the source of third language (L3) crosslinguistic influence. The two orthogonal questions that arise are which language is most likely to influence the L3 and whether the influence will be wholesale or piecemeal (property-by-property). To my mind, Westergaard’s Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) is preferable to other theoretical models (say Rothman’s Typological Primacy Model) insofar as it is consistent with many aspects of L2/L3 phonological learnability that I am familiar with. Westergaard proposes a structure-based piecemeal approach to the explanation of third language acquisition (L3A). The model is driven by parsing and dictates that the first language (L1) or second language (L2) structure which is hypothesized to be most similar to the L3 structure will be the one to transfer.

The Role of Age in the Domain of Subject Expression in Young Italian-German Bilinguals

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Anna-Lena Scherger ◽  
Katrin Schmitz
Keyword(s):  
Speech Rate ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
School Aged Children ◽  
Early School ◽  
Subject Expression ◽  
German Children ◽  
The One ◽  
Italian Children

Research literature on bilingual acquisition of the null subject property has focused on the one hand on young children up to the age of 5 and on the other hand on adult heritage speakers. Literature on early school-aged children is scarce. However, Serratrice (2007) and Wolleb (2013) could not detect differences in terms of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) between monolingual Italian children and bilingual Italian-English children at the age of 5 to 8 years. The present paper presents oral data based on semi-structured interviews of Italian-German children (age 6 to 10, mean 8.2 years, n=12) and adult Italian heritage speakers in Germany (age 17 to 43, mean 26.9 years, n=16). We show that the school-aged heritage speakers perform much the same as the adult ones, in both subject expression in total and subject omissions by grammatical person, contrasting findings of CLI in younger bilingual German-Italian children (Schmitz, Patuto, & Müller, 2012). In addition, results show that the children’s subject expression is in most utterances pragmatically felicitous to a degree comparable to the adult HS. Concerning language-external factors, we investigated the influence of speech rate, sex, and age on subject expression and observe that adults vary more with increasing age than the young speakers do. We argue that both investigated groups clearly display native competence in the domain of subject expression.

The role of the second language in third language acquisition: the case of Germanic syntax

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Bardel ◽  
Ylva Falk
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Qualitative Difference ◽  
Initial State ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Considerable Evidence ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
L3 Acquisition

In this study of the placement of sentence negation in third language acquisition (L3), we argue that there is a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true second language (L2) and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Although there is considerable evidence for L2 influence on vocabulary acquisition in L3, not all researchers believe that such influence generalizes to morphosyntactic aspects of the grammar. For example, Håkansson et al. (2002) introduce the Developmentally Moderated Transfer Hypothesis (DMTH), which incorporates transfer in Processability Theory (PT). They argue against syntactic transfer from L2 to L3. The present study presents counter-evidence to this hypothesis from two groups of learners with different L1s and L2s acquiring Swedish or Dutch as L3. The evidence clearly indicates that syntactic structures are more easily transferred from L2 than from L1 in the initial state of L3 acquisition. The two groups behave significantly differently as to the placement of negation, a difference that can be attributed to the L2 knowledge of the learners in interaction with the typological relationship between the L2 and the L3.

L2 activation and blending in third language acquisition: Evidence of crosslinguistic influence from the L2 in a longitudinal study on the acquisition of L3 English

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA SÁNCHEZ
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
Source Language ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence

This paper reports the findings of a four-year longitudinal study that examined the role of prior linguistic knowledge on the written L3 production of 93 Spanish/Catalan learners. Two research questions guided the study: the first asked whether a background language (L1s Spanish/Catalan, L2 German) would activate in parallel with L3 English during word construction attempts involving verbal forms, and if so, which would be the source language of blending. The second addressed the progressive readjustments of L2 activation and blending in the course of the first 200 hours of instruction. The elicitation technique was a written narrative based on a story telling task. Data were collected first when the learners were on average 9.9 years old (T1), and again at the ages of 10.9 (T2), 11.9 (T3) and 12.9 (T4). The focus of analysis was on word construction attempts that involved verbal forms. The results suggest that a background language, the L2, did indeed activate, especially at early stages of L3 acquisition.

Constraints on subject-verb agreement marking in Turkish-German bilingual speakers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serkan Uygun ◽  
Claudia Felser
Keyword(s):  
Subject Position ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
General Preference ◽  
Advanced Proficiency ◽  
The One ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Turkish German

Abstract Turkish 3rd person plural subjects normally appear with verbs that are unmarked for number. Following earlier findings which indicate that Turkish heritage speakers (HS) accept overt plural marking more readily compared to monolingually raised Turkish speakers, the present study investigates to what extent bilingual speakers are sensitive to grammatical, surface-level and semantic constraints on Turkish plural agreement marking. A scalar acceptability judgement task was carried out with non-bilingual Turkish speakers residing in Turkey and Turkish-German bilinguals residing in Germany. Our experimental design involved manipulating both subject animacy and subject position. Participants’ judgement patterns confirmed Turkish speakers’ general preference for unmarked verb forms, which was modulated both by subject animacy and by subject position. Significant differences were observed between lower proficiency HS on the one hand, and monolinguals and advanced proficiency HS on the other, suggesting that the relatively subtle interplay between different types of constraint on number agreement marking is affected by heritage language conditions. We found no evidence for simplification or optionality reduction in the lower proficiency HS’ judgements, however. We innovate on previous research by using Gradient Symbolic Computation modelling to capture between-group differences in the relative weightings of the constraints under investigation.

scholarly journals A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eloi Puig-Mayenco ◽  
Jorge González Alonso ◽  
Jason Rothman
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
First Language ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Transfer Data ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Third Language Acquisition ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
Present Systematic Review

The present systematic review examines what factors determine when, how and to what extent previous linguistic experience (from the first language, second language or both languages) affects the initial stages and beyond of adult third language (L3) acquisition. In doing so, we address what a bird’s eye view of the data tells us regarding competing theoretical accounts of L3 morphosyntactic transfer. Data couple together to suggest that some factors are more influential than others. As discussed, the systematic review transcends the field of adult multilingualism precisely because of what it reveals, as a prima facie example in behavioral research, in terms of how different types of methodological considerations impact the way data are interpreted to support or not particular claims.

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