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9 - Full Transfer Potential in L3/Ln Acquisition

Crosslinguistic Influence as a Property-by-Property Process

from Part II - L3/Ln across Linguistic Domains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

By
Marit Westergaard ,
Natalia Mitrofanova ,
Yulia Rodina  and
Roumyana Slabakova
Edited by
Jennifer Cabrelli ,
Adel Chaouch-Orozco ,
Jorge González Alonso ,
Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares ,
Eloi Puig-Mayenco  and
Jason Rothman
Jennifer Cabrelli
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Adel Chaouch-Orozco
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Jorge González Alonso
Affiliation:
Universidad Nebrija, Spain and UiT, Arctic University of Norway
Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Eloi Puig-Mayenco
Affiliation:
King's College London
Jason Rothman
Affiliation:
UiT, Arctic University of Norway and Universidad Nebrija, Spain
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Summary

This chapter discusses L3/Ln acquisition as a step-by-step acquisition process, where crosslinguistic influence is considered to be the result of co-activation of lexical items and syntactic structures of the previously acquired languages in processing. That is, as argued by the Linguistic Proximity Model and the Scalpel Model, L3/Ln acquisition is learning by parsing/processing. The main focus of the chapter is on theoretical arguments for crosslinguistic influence taking place incrementally from either or both previously acquired language(s). The chapter also discusses methodological issues for studies that aim to identify hybrid influence, emphasizing the importance of a subtracted language group design, where the influence of individual languages can be isolated by comparing L3 learners to L2 learners of the same target language, but where one of the previously acquired languages is missing (subtracted). Furthermore, the chapter provides a brief overview of empirical L3 studies, finding support for property-by-property acquisition.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition , pp. 219 - 242
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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