Cross-linguistic influence

In his research on bilingualism, Weinreich noticed a process of “interference” between the two languages of the bilingual speaker, marked by deviation from the grammatical norms of either language. Lado referred to this process as a “transfer of forms, meanings and culture” from the native language of the speaker (L1) to his second or foreign language (L2). Corder and Sharwood Smith redefined the notion as a “cross linguistic influence” that included the third and fourth languages of the learner, while Odlin confirmed the notion of transfer with data from empirical evidence.

Research data shows that transfer occurs whenever two or more languages come into contact, and that these influences are effected in two directions: from the native language of the learner(L1) to the second language (L2) as substratum transfer, and from the second language (L2) to the native language (L1) as borrowing transfer. The influence of one language on the other could be positive, facilitating the learning of the lexicon and grammar, or negative, shown in lexical, pragmatic, discourse, or cultural departure from the target language norms. That digression phenomenon could create vagueness, lack of coherence and focus, and lack of relevance in the interlanguage of the learner of the second language. This paper discusses such issues of logicality, ambiguity and relevance in the written English of a native Romanian.

L2 reading entails a complex cross-linguistic interaction between L1 reading ability and L2 linguistic knowledge. As such, it is seen as a dynamic process of coalescing diverse resources, including cognitive skills, linguistic knowledge, and metalinguistic awareness, in two languages. In this chapter, we explain the nature of morphological awareness as an abstract, yet language-dependent, construct. We then analyze systematic variations in grapheme-morpheme relationships in typologically different languages. Based on the analysis, we propose specific predictions regarding the joint contributions of L1 reading and L2 resources to the development and utilization of L2 morphological awareness. We report a summary of a study addressing the relative contributions of L1 reading ability, L2 morphological awareness and L2 linguistic knowledge to L2 word meaning inference. As a process of text meaning construction, reading heavily relies on knowledge of word meanings. It entails retrieving word meanings from memory and integrating them into a coherent message intended by the author. Successful comprehension demands both effortless access to the meaning of familiar words and the ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words through word form analysis. Metalinguistic awareness, an explicit representation of the abstract structure of language, provides vital assistance in word form analysis. As abstract insight, metalinguistic awareness enables readers to segment a familiar word into its phonological and morphological constituents, and in so doing, allows them to identify familiar sub-lexical elements in the unfamiliar word and use them to infer its pronunciation and meaning (Ehri, 2014). Metalinguistic awareness emerges through detecting and

Existing literature indicated several influences of L1 Arabic on L2 English:
~ Overuse of and
~ Run-on sentences
~ Omission or misuse of articles, prepositions, and relative clauses
~ Omission or confusion of vowels
~ Preference for root word groups
~ Omission of punctuation
~ Overuse of exaggeration

Based on analysis of the writing samples, this study focused most on errors in punctuation, conjunctions, capitalization, and articles.

Other aspects of English writing, such as word order, prepositions, and exaggeration did not appear as major examples of cross-linguistic transfer in this study.

This chapter provides an overview of research on the phonetic changes that occur in one's native language (L1) due to recent experience in another language (L2), a phenomenon known as phonetic drift. Through a survey of empirical findings on segmental and suprasegmental acoustic properties, the chapter examines the features of the L1 that are subject to phonetic drift, the cognitive mechanism(s) behind phonetic drift, and the various factors that influence the likelihood of phonetic drift. In short, virtually all aspects of L1 speech are subject to drift, but different aspects do not drift in the same manner, possibly due to multiple routes of L2 influence coexisting at different levels of L1 phonological structure. In addition to the timescale of these changes, the chapter discusses the relationship between phonetic drift and attrition as well as some of the enduring questions in this area.

This study examines patterns of lexical and syntactic transfer in Finnish students’ written English between 1990 and 2005. It focuses on charting what types of lexical and syntactic transfer patterns occur in the written English production of L1 Finnish learners, and on tracking a possible change in these patterns in order to see if they reflect an improvement in the learners’ English competence, which is believed to have taken place during the past few decades as a result of, for example, their more frequent contacts with the English language and the development of foreign language pedagogy. The overall aims of this study are to promote our understanding of the phenomenon of language transfer in learners whose first language is genetically and typologically distant from the target language, as well as to identify typical deviant features in the learner English of Finnish students and to shed some light on the changes that have taken place in certain aspects of their written English skills between 1990–2005.

The material for this study consists of a corpus of written English compositions by Finnish Upper Secondary School students. The corpus contains 500 English compositions
written as a part of the Finnish national Matriculation Examination in 1990, 2000 and 2005. The features investigated involve 9 different aspects of lexical transfer and 5 syntactic transfer patterns. The identification of language transfer relies on Finnish–English contrastive descriptions and the comparison of Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking students of the equivalent level. The comparison corpus consists of Matriculation Examination compositions written by Swedish-speaking candidates in Finland.

The results show that lexical and syntactic transfer patterns in Finnish students’ written English have taken on divergent paths of development during the investigated period. While most types of lexical transfer phenomena have significantly decreased, syntactic transfer patterns have remained equally frequent or increased. These findings point towards improved lexical idiomaticity in English, but do not indicate positive changes in the students’ syntactic development. This non-parallel development of lexical and syntactic transfer patterns shows that for learners whose L1 is genetically and typologically distant from the L2 transfer is more persistent at the level of syntax than it is at the level of lexicon. These findings are interpreted as a reflection of the changes that have taken place in the formal and informal learning environments for English as a foreign language in Finland during the past couple of decades. The increased exposure to and use of English in Finnish society, as well as the current focus on communicativeness
in foreign language pedagogy seem to have helped Finnish students to overcome negative transfer effects in certain areas of their vocabulary knowledge in English, but
not in their usage of English syntactic structures which deviate from the corresponding Finnish structures.

The article deals with the cross-linguistic influence of English (L2) on the aquisition of German (L3) in the Republic of China. In Taiwan, English is taught as the first foreign language in public and private schools. Even at the university English language courses are often obligatory. Based on the fact that German will be learned after English, it would be reasonable to take advantage of the sequence of languages, “German after English”. In order to better understand the influence of previously acquired languages in the interlanguage of adults, the relation between English and German will be examined.
The current study was designed to investigate whether Taiwanese students with Mandarin Chinese as their first language (L1) are aware of cross-linguistic influence in multiple language acquisition and learning. The data were collected from six universities in the northern and central parts of Taiwan during the summer term of 2008. The subjects consisted of 242 undergraduate students enrolled in different colleges. The majority of the participants had learned German as their minor field, as a second or further foreign language in beginner courses for approximately one year. They were asked to complete a standardised questionnaire in Chinese regarding tertiary language acquisition.
The major question addressed by the empirical study referred to in this paper is whether the experience of learning English as an L2 exerts an influence on learning the target language German as an L3. Furthermore, the following questions will be investigated: How do students assess the fact that German is frequently learned after English in Taiwan? How can previous linguistic knowledge and experience of foreign language learning positively and effectively be implemented in practice a German classroom? Does (positive and negative) interlingual transfer differ in the learner’s point of view if instructors of German explicitly call attention to linguistic/cultural similarities or differences especially between the two closely related Indo-Germanic languages, English and German?
The results of this study indicate that there is positive and negative transfer when Taiwanese students learn German as a foreign language. They are aware of cross-linguistic influence in multiple language acquisition and learning. The role of interlingual transfer still remains as one of the main questions in third language acquisition; therefore, the results of this study will help to better understand not only the influence of English (L2) in the acquisition of German (L3), but also the role of interlanguage in general.

Der Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem Einfluss des Erwerbs der ersten Fremdsprache Englisch (L2) auf den Erwerb des Deutschen als Fremdsprache (L3) in Taiwan. In Taiwan, wie fast überall auf der Welt, wird Englisch als erste Fremdsprache gelehrt und gelernt. Auf Grund dieser Situation stellt sich mit besonderer Deutlichkeit die Frage, ob es nicht sinnvoll wäre, im Deutschunterricht Vorteile aus diesem Umstand zu ziehen, dass Deutsch in Taiwan zwingend nach Englisch gelernt wird. Um sich diesem Themenkomplex zu nähern, haben wir mit Hilfe eines standardisierten Fragebogens Daten gewonnen. Dabei wurden rund 150 taiwanische Studierende verschiedener Fachbereiche an verschiedenen Universitäten des Landes untersucht, die alle Deutsch als Tertiärsprache erlernen. Folgenden Fragestellungen stehen bei unserer Untersuchung im Mittelpunkt: Inwieweit wird der Situation, dass in Taiwan Deutsch stets nach Englisch unterrichtet wird, aus Lernersicht Rechnung getragen? Werden, und wenn ja, wie werden aus Sicht der Lernenden vorhandene L2-Sprachkenntnisse und Sprachlernerfahrungen positiv für das Lernen einer L3 genutzt? Unterscheiden sich Transfer und Interferenz aus der Sicht der Lernenden, wenn die L3-Lehrenden Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zu L2 thematisieren bzw. nicht thematisieren?

This paper attempts to explore the effect of Chinese (L1) syntactic structures on the accurate production of English (L2) writing composition. The paper gives an overview of the literature concerning the field of Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) and also classifies the errors encountered by second language learners. Using 9 PMP writing exam papers, frequency of errors was recorded and then an error analysis was carried out to ascertain if there were any statistically significant errors. Errors were then situated in Stockwell, Bowen and Martin’s (1965) Hierarchy of Difficulty. The statistics show that, of the 19 error categories, 12 error categories were statistically significant which shows that Chinese learners of English have difficulty with many syntactic structures in English due to the negative language transfer of their L1. The findings suggest that English language instructors would perhaps be more effective if they emphasised learning areas of the English language which do not correspond well with the Chinese language.

This study investigates cross-linguistic influence (‘transfer’) in Norwegian interlanguage using predictive data mining technology and with a focus on lexical transfer. The impetus for the present work came from the publication of a series of studies (Jarvis & Crossley 2012) that explore the ‘detection-based approach’ to language transfer.

The following research questions are addressed:

1. Can data mining techniques be used to identify the L1 background of Norwegian language learners on the basis of their use of lexical features of the target language?
2. If so, what are the best predictors of L1 background?
3. And can those predictors be traced to cross-linguistic influence?

The study utilizes data from Norsk andrespråkskorpus (ASK), the Norwegian Second Language Corpus housed at the University of Bergen, and draws on resources from the ASKeladden project. The source data consists of texts written by 1,736 second language learners of Norwegian from ten different L1 backgrounds, and a control corpus of 200 texts written by native speakers. Word frequencies computed from this data are analysed using multivariate statistical methods that include analysis of variance and linear discriminant analysis, and the results are subjected to contrastive analysis.

The combination of discriminant analysis and contrastive analysis produces all three types of evidence called for by Jarvis (2000) in his methodological requirements for language transfer research: intragroup homogeneity, intergroup heterogeneity and cross-language congruity. Well-known transfer effects, such as the tendency for Russian learners to omit indefinite articles, are confirmed, and other, more subtle patterns of learner language are revealed, such as the tendency amongst Dutch learners to overuse the modal verb skal to a far greater extent than other learners. In addition to confirming the reality of lexical transfer, these results provide abundant material for further research, while the methodology employed can be harnessed in many areas of linguistic research.

Alcohol intoxication is known to affect pitch variability in non-tonal languages. In this study, intoxication's effects on pitch were examined in tonal and non-tonal language speakers, in both their native language (L1; German, Korean, Mandarin) and nonnative language (L2; English). Intoxication significantly increased pitch variability in the German group (in L1 and L2), but not in the Korean or Mandarin groups (in L1 or L2), although there were individual differences. These results support the view that pitch control is related to the functional load of pitch and is an aspect of speech production that can be advantageously transferred across languages, overriding the expected effects of alcohol.

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This article proposes the Scalpel Model, a new model of third and additional language (L3/Ln) acquisition. The model aims to identify and examine what happens beyond the initial state of acquisition and what factors may influence change from one state of knowledge to another.
Design/Methodology/Approach: The article briefly examines the currently proposed hypotheses and models and evaluates the existing evidence for their predictions. It highlights several cognitive and experiential factors affecting crosslinguistic influence that are not taken into account by the current models. These factors include: structural linguistic complexity, misleading input or lack of clear unambiguous evidence for some property or construction, construction frequency in the target L3, and prevalent language activation or use.
Data and Analysis: Findings of recently published research are discussed to support of the Scalpel Model. In particular, findings of differential learnability of properties within the same groups of learners suggest that L1 or L2 transfer happens property by property and is influenced by diverse factors.
Findings/Conclusions: The Scalpel Model explicitly argues that wholesale transfer of one of the previously acquired languages does not happen at the initial stages of acquisition because it is not necessary. It also argues that transfer can be from the L1 or the L2 or both, but it is not only facilitative.
Originality: The new model increases the explanatory coverage of the current experimental findings on how the L3/Ln linguistic representations develop.
Significance/Implications: The model emphasizes the importance of the cognitive, experiential and linguistic influences on the L3/Ln beyond transfer from the L1 or L2. Thus it aligns L3/Ln acquisition with current debates within L2 acquisition theory.

This paper reviews evidence for the Parasitic Model of Vocabulary Acquisition for second and third language learners/developing multilinguals. It first describes the model’s predictions about default processes based on the detection and use of similarity at the three stages involved in the development of individual lexical items: (1) the establishing of a form representation, (2) the building of connections to syntactic frame and concept representations, and (3) the strengthening and automatization of representations and access routes. The paper then summarizes both naturalistic and experimental evidence for processes involved at these three stages. Finally it discusses open issues and potential areas for future investigation.

This research aims to find the extent to which a semester-long hybrid college course of first-year accelerated Spanish with explicit phonological instruction helps a group of eight native English speakers and one native French speaker acquire the Spanish open low central unrounded vowel /a/ in Spanish as L2 and L3 respectively, by analyzing the subjects' production of this segment in different stress and syllabic contexts. The change in quality of this vowel was analyzed by monitoring the extent to which F1 and F2 changed over a sixteen-week period using spectrographic analysis on their production of /a/ at three times during the semester: at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. A comparison with the same two /a/ formants of L1 native Spanish speakers helped to provide information on whether a significant difference originated in production as a consequence of the course’s explicit phonological instruction element, as well as the degree to which the L1 of the subjects exert an effect on the acquisition of this vocalic segment. Learners answered the Pronunciation Attitude Inventory (Elliott, 1995) in order to find out whether a willingness to improve was correlated with an improvement or lack thereof in phonological production.

Much of the current research into language learning and teaching is concerned with the phenomenon referred to as language transfer, especially with its negative effects in terms of second language acquisition and production. The advantages of language transfer, however, have received rather scant attention despite the fact that cross-linguistic influence may be seen as an effective language learning strategy. That is why this paper is to lay emphasis on the positive aspects of foreign languages already known to learners—on the previous knowledge of one’s second language that is likely to blaze a trail for both new vocabulary and grammatical structures in other languages. Based on a survey conducted among students, the paper aims to explore the instances of cross-linguistic influence as regards third language learners, as well as to evaluate their level of knowledge concerning language transfer and its didactic application.

This Ph.D. dissertation addresses possible bilingualism effects on speakers’ linguistic processing and representation through a psycholinguistic methodology. Our primary focus is the analysis of how bilingualism can influence bilinguals’ first language (L1), but we also investigate possible phenomena present in the acquisition of a second language (L2)-specific structure. More specifically, the research objectives are (i) to verify whether bilinguals exhibit reduced processing cost to read an L2-specific construction in the L1, (ii) to analyze whether these bilinguals accept this construction in their L1 and (iii) to investigate if bilinguals learn both the licensed and the unlicensed features of this construction in the L2. The participants are highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-English bilinguals immersed either in the L1 or in the L2. The target structure is the resultative construction (e.g., Samuel wiped the table clean) and our control structure is the depictive construction (e.g., Samuel ate the salmon raw). Both constructions are grammatical in English, but only the depictive is licensed in BP. Furthermore, we observe how the participants process and perceive some ungrammatical resultative sentences (e.g., Samuel twisted the toy broken) in English. In order to reach the research objectives, we conducted a series of experiments using the Maze Task (MT) and the Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) paradigms in both BP and English. The results from the experiments in BP indicate that both immersed and non-immersed bilinguals process the adjective in the resultative construction significantly faster than BP monolinguals. However, bilinguals and monolinguals perceived the resultative construction as less acceptable than the depictive construction. These results suggest that bilingualism can exert influence on L1 linguistic processing, but such influence does not result in changes in bilinguals’ overall L1 grammar, at least in regards to the constructions under scrutiny. The data from the experiments in English indicates that bilinguals and monolinguals process the resultative construction as fast as they process the depictive construction. They also show an additional processing cost when reading the ungrammatical resultative sentences. Moreover, bilinguals and monolinguals do not differ significantly from each other in their acceptability judgments of the resultative sentences in English, but bilinguals give significantly higher acceptability ratings to the ungrammatical resultative sentences as compared to monolinguals. These results suggest that bilinguals can learn L2-specific constructions, but they are less sensitive to L2-specific restrictions than monolinguals are. We discuss all these findings in light of different theoretical perspectives, among which we highlight the Multi-Competence, the Multiple-Grammars and the Negative Evidence hypotheses.

Résumé
Le rôle des influences translinguistiques occupe une place de plus en plus remarquable dans les recherches menées dans le domaine de l’acquisition des troisièmes langues. Cet article se propose, à travers l’étude des transferts lexicaux et syntaxiques, de mettre en lumière le rôle joué par l’espagnol en tant que langue maternelle (L1) et l’anglais deuxième langue (L2) dans l’acquisition du français troisième langue (L3). Notre étude est basée sur un corpus constitué par des productions écrites réalisées, tout au long d’un semestre, par des étudiants hispanophones en première année de la filière Langues Modernes de l’Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). Ce travail vise à identifier les difficultés que ce
contexte multilingue d’apprentissage peut avoir chez nos apprenants afin d’établir un diagnostic précoce qui permettra d’entreprendre les stratégies pédagogiques précises et adaptées à leurs besoins.
Abstract
"The study of cross-linguistic influences is becoming more and more important in third  language  acquisition  research.  This  article  presents,  through  the  study  of lexical and syntactic transfers, the role played by Spanish L1 and English L2 in the acquisition of French L3. The present study focuses on a corpus of written productions by Spanish university students enrolled in the degree of Modern Languages at  the  Universidad  de  Las  Palmas  de  Gran  Canaria.  This  paper  aims  to  identify the difficulties that this multilingual context entails for our learners, in order to establish  an  early  diagnosis  that  will  allow  us  to  develop  pedagogical  strategies adapted to their specific needs."

This paper aims to investigate how tonogenesis in Seoul Korean affects non-native language acquisition in a multilingual context with L1 Cantonese, L2 English and L3 Korean. We are also interested to examine the source and direction of cross-linguistic influences in the acquisition of VOT and F0 patterns which are used for the stop contrasts. Sixteen L3 Korean learners differing in proficiencies (beginning vs. intermediate) were recorded reading a list of words embedded in carrier sentences in the three languages. Results from acoustic analyses found that the learners did not merge VOTs for the Korean lax and aspirated stop contrast, but they showed the tendency for tonogenesis, such as their heavy use of f0 in producing different Korean stops. Furthermore, comparison between the beginners and the intermediate learners revealed various cross-linguistic influences: regressive transfer of f0 on L1 and L2, bidirectional interaction of f0 values between L2 and L3, and L1 influence on the production of VOT in L2 and L3. These findings suggest that L3 transfer happens in a cue-by-cue manner, i.e. VOT and f0 need to be accounted for separately.

This article reports on a study that used the online MULTITEACH questionnaire to examine the relationship between the multilingual pedagogies 111 language teachers, employed in upper-secondary schools in Norway and Russia, reported implementing, their beliefs about how multilingualism benefitted students and teachers, and their self-assessed ability to teach language aspects and skills. The study also investigated whether sociobiographical variables and participants’ language habits outside of work affected their beliefs about multilingualism benefitting their students and implementation of multilingual pedagogies. The findings revealed that participants utilized multilingual pedagogies least frequently when teaching in first language contexts and that those who used foreign languages outside of work applied such pedagogies more frequently than participants who did not. Moreover, their beliefs about multilingualism benefitting their students were positively predicted by their beliefs about multilingualism benefitting teachers and negatively predicted by their support of the monolingual approach to language learning and teaching.

The present study sheds light on cross-linguistic influence and language transfer in third or additional language learning and explores the factors affecting the learning of third or additional language in a multilingual context. It aims at investigating the extent to which the typologically more similar language influences the language being learned. This study was carried out with the participation of 30 third-year students in the foreign languages stream at Al-Kawakibi Secondary School-Touggourt in Algeria. The participants had Arabic as L1, French as L2, English as L3 and they were learning L4 German. The instruments included two translation tasks and a paragraph writing in German, in addition to a questionnaire about learners' self-rated language proficiency of their non-native languages. The findings show that students tend to translate into the language which is typologically more similar to German, in this case English, that influences learning L4 German the most.

Research into figurative language identifies variables such as familiarity, transparency, decomposability and motivation, all of which play an important role in how native and non-native speakers learn, process and understand figurative phrases. However, these variables are not always defined and operationalised in the same way, and are often treated as independent. We discuss these factors as they relate to the judgements that language users make, and as they relate to the ability to correctly infer meaning in a range of familiar and unfamiliar idioms, and novel metaphors. In a rating study, we show that familiarity has a clear effect on perceptions of transparency. For less familiar idioms, judgments of decomposability after the meaning became known were strongly affected by whether or not speakers were correct in guessing the meaning. We also saw clear cross-language effects, whereby idioms that exist in the L1 for non-native speakers were seen as more familiar, more transparent and were better identified. We discuss how these factors contribute at different stages to allow speakers to make sense of both familiar and unfamiliar figurative phrases.

"The study of speech perception has been separated traditionally from that of general auditory science. Studies based on the belief that speech perception relies on a specialized (modular) perceptual system distinct from general auditory processing, such as Jusczyk and Bertoncini (1988) have been widely accepted amongst researchers, based in many cases on the Motor Theory of speech perception (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985). This issue was raised by Samuel & Tartter, whose 1986 work aimed at finding out whether explanations of speech perception could be based on general acoustic properties of the signal, or whether they required speech-specific phonetic mechanisms. This has changed thanks to the focus of researchers on how perception of speech is influenced by working memory, attention, neural dynamics, and general processing at peripheral and central levels, which suggest that speech perception is not inherently different from other types of auditory processing. One of the main issues in the L2 acquisition of phonemic distinctions is whether learners are able to perceive new phonemes before effectively producing them. Even though the general consensus is that perception precedes production (Altvater-Mackensen & Fikkert, 2010), four possibilities are to be considered: (a) learners who can neither perceive nor produce  new phonemes; (b) learners who can both perceive and produce new phonemes; (c) learners who can perceive but are not able to produce new phonemes; and (d) learners who cannot perceive but are able to produce new phonemes. In addition to adult or adolescents who possess already a fixed L1 learning a new language in either an instruction or a naturalistic context, infants who are simultaneous bilinguals and children who are sequential bilinguals need to be considered as well in both contexts in order to have a clearer picture of the processing of phonemes and sounds in general by the brain. Studying the way this takes place can provide us with information on how speech perception is accomplished and, on the other hand, research on speech perception can help us understand how the auditory system functions; therefore, theories of general perceptual-cognitive processing are crucial to understand the auditory dynamics involved in speech processing.
The term 'cognition' is associated to the concept of knowledge, and has been used specifically to designate the conditions that allow humans to develop knowledge of the world, brought to us by our senses. Without perception, no knowledge would exist, at least in the way we have come to understand it. To emphaslze the cognitive aspects of audition is fundamental to understand the way auditory information is part of the equation in the development of knowledge.
The present study would aim to help us understand how the brain responds to old (native) versus new (non-native) phonemes (vowels) by analyzing the pattern of cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) as an electrophysiological measure of human speech encoding, the same way Agung, Purdy, McMahon & Newall (2006) did to study vocalic processing in auditorily impaired subjects. Another measure to be used is MMNs (mismatch negativities) in ERPs (event-related potentials), as Cheour, Kushnerenko, Čeponienė, Fellman & Näätänen (2002) did to find out whether duration changes in complex harmonic tones provoked a significant MMN response in newborns. The analysis of the types of features that contribute to this distinction/contrast in infants and children raised in Spanish-speaking households in the US, and in newly arrived monolingual (Spanish-speaking) immigrants in the US with little or no previous exposure to English may help us understand how coexistent phonemic systems are developed."

Wie die Existenz der persischen, so erschien auch die der arabischen Lehnwörter im Jakutischen zuerst wegen der geographischen Entfernung dieser Völker ausgeschlossen. Das große jakutische Wörterbuch von E. Piekarski ermöglichte jedoch einen tieferen Einblick in den jakutischen Wortschatz und seit
dieser Zeit begegnen uns in der turkologischen Literatur verstreute Hinweise auf die persische bzw. arabische Herkunft des einen oder anderen Wortes. Diese zu sammeln und zu sichten, schien eine dankbare Aufgabe zu sein.

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and noun animacy. In Experiment 2, neither group showed learning of a mapping between articles and a linguistically anomalous concept (the number of capital letters in an English word or that of strokes in a Chinese character). In Experiment 3, the Chinese group, but not the English group, showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and a concept derived from the Chinese classifier system. It was concluded that first language knowledge affected implicit language learning and that implicit learning, at least when natural language learning is concerned, is subject to constraints and biases.(Received March 11 2013)(Accepted November 21 2013)(Revised February 13 2014)

This study is based on the theoretical framework of conceptual transfer established by Jarvis (1998, 2007) and on the typology of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages developed by Talmy (1985, 2000). The relationship between conceptual transfer and the thinking for speaking hypothesis (Slobin, 1996b) is also considered. We show that conceptual transfer applies in the translation of lexicalisation patterns in Motion events from Spanish into English. Our informants are twenty Spanish speaking translation students who specialize in translation from Spanish/English, English/Spanish. They were faced with a series of ten sentences containing 7 examples including motion verbs and 3 distractors. The results seem to show that the translations from Spanish to English indicate a preference to follow the L1 lexicalisation pattern, coding Path in the main verb and Manner in a separate constituent, as opposed to the English lexicalisation pattern where Manner of Motion is conflated in a single lexical item and Path is indicated in a satellite. This misuse of the English pattern can be interpreted as an example of conceptual transfer. When conceptual transfer is at work non-target-like translations are produced. More attention needs to be paid to the different conceptual structures of motion events in both languages

"La coordinación (o retraso) del comienzo de la sonoridad, o VOT por sus siglas en inglés, se define típicamente como la diferencia en tiempo entre la apertura de la oclusión labial, dental o velar de la consonante (distensión, que marca el comienzo del periodo de propagación espectral) y el comienzo de actividad periódica: o la barra de sonoridad de baja frecuencia, o el comienzo del F1, o bandas paralelas, lo que se dé primero. En otras palabras, el VOT puede considerarse como el intervalo de tiempo que existe entre la emisión del aire posterior a la oclusión característica de la consonante, y el comienzo de las vibraciones de la laringe, o vibración supraglotal (Winitz, 1975). El estudio de la coordinación del comienzo de la sonoridad es relevante, ya que su variación tiene consecuencias léxicas y semánticas, y una de las tareas más fundamentales de la fonología es establecer cómo es que se pueden transmitir diferentes mensajes lingüísticos a través del sonido. Ya sea que se trate de diferencias léxicas o en funciones gramaticales, los mensajes que no son idénticos deben tener distintas codificaciones físicas, sean paradigmáticas -diversos códigos de un inventario finito- y/o sintagmáticas -permutaciones diversas de los códigos- (Ohala, 1995). Existen métodos bien establecidos para descubrir las correlaciones físicas de diferentes mensajes lingüísticos en casos en los que son ambiguos o de interpretación discutible. Aunque tales estudios se consideren generalmente como de interés puramente fonético y no fonológico, es claro que es necesario poder encontrar casos en los que la realidad del habla a través de análisis fonéticos concuerde con los conceptos fonológicos para así darles validación y fundamento.

What is known as Voice Onset Timing (VOT) is typically defined as the difference in time between the opening of the labial, dental or velar consonantal closure (air release, which marks the beginning of the spectral activity), and the beginning of periodic patterns: either the low frequency sonority bar, or the beginning of formant activity. In other words, the VOT can be considered as the time interval between the emission of the air after the closure characteristic of the consonant and the onset of vibrations of the larynx, or supraglotal vibration (Winitz, 1975). The study of the timing of the start of the sonority is relevant, since its variation has lexical and semantic consequences, and one of the most fundamental tasks of phonology is to establish how it is that language can convey different messages through sound. Whether it be lexical differences or grammatical functions, non-identical messages must have diverse physical encodings, either paradigmatic -various codes of a finite inventory- and/or syntagmatic -diverse permutations of the encoding-(Ohala, 1995). Well-established methods exist for discovering physical correlations of different linguistic messages in cases that are ambiguous or possess questionable interpretation. Although such studies are generally considered purely phonetic and not phonological, it is clear that it is necessary to find cases in which the reality of speech through phonetic analysis is consistent with phonological concepts."

Just like monolingual children, bilingual children need to carve up the referential space to understand and produce discourse-appropriate referential expressions. In the case of bilinguals this demanding task additionally requires language-specific form-function mappings that may be structurally similar or different in their two languages. Cases of partial form-function overlap across languages, especially with respect to third person pronouns, have been the focus of much scrutiny in connection with the issue of cross-linguistic influence. In this chapter we review naturalistic and experimental evidence showing how the degree of structural overlap across two languages, the degree of variability in the target language(s), and the amount of input that is necessary to home in on the target grammar(s) constrain the comprehension and production of referential expressions in bilingual acquisition.

Most language transfer studies focus on the influence that L1 may have on the comprehension and production of L2. When such influence inhibits L2 production, it has been often referred to as interference or negative transfer (see Isurin 2005 among others). The present study is a report on a pilot survey with the aim of investigating whether cross-linguistic influence (CLI) or language transfer occurs when L2 is rendered into L1, i.e. to what extent L2 can influence production of L1. Fifteen translations from English into Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian were examined (approx. 10500 words), done by 15 University of Zenica advanced (MA) students of English. The zero hypothesis was that the students' foreign language (English) would have certain influence on native language production and create instances of " language deviations from the norm " (see Weinreich 1966) in the students' native language (BCS), e.g. translating " visiting " in " The visiting Evlija Čelebi summarized (…) " as " gostujući " (appearing within " Gostujući Evlija Čelebija sažeo je(…) "). The primary objective has been to determine the linguistic categories in which instances of transfer occur, borrowing the taxonomy from Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008). The classification would serve as a starting point for the analysis of translations of a larger number of English texts, whereby it would be possible to identify those instances of lexical items, syntactic structures, morphological forms, etc. in the source language which are the most frequent triggers of language transfer in the target language. The translations can prove a fertile ground for such research. According to Hatim and Munday (2004) " translated language in general displays specific characteristics, known as universals of translation " , including the " law of interference – common ST lexical and syntactic patterns tend to be copied creating unusual patterns in TT ". In order to achieve the objective, the present study has two practical goals: the first is to find out which linguistic category/ies is/are most represented in the instances of transfer, and the other is to establish the ratio of negative transfer errors in all translation errors on the basis of a minute inspection of two individual translations.

An increasing number of students of various minority and immigrant backgrounds makes greater knowledge of the sources of cross-linguistic influence among bilingual students not only of theoretical value, but also beneficial for improving language teaching and instruction. The aim of this thesis has been to investigate conceptual cross-linguistic influence in functional bilinguals with a focus on investigating whether the context and frequency of the bilingual’s use of the two languages explain cross-linguistic influence towards an L3, and whether variation in acquisition could be explained by linguistic similarity, either factual or perceived. The present study replicated the results of Jiang (2002) regarding the effect of the L1 on the lexis of the L2 in terms of similarity evaluations, with the addition that this effect is also observable with two groups of language learners. Furthermore, the findings support the previous hypotheses that the lexical development in the L3 is not only guided by the mother tongue, but also by other previously acquired languages which is in line with the expectations of the L1 lemma mediation hypothesis (Jiang, 2000).

In Ideas That Changed Literacy Practices: First-Person Accounts from Leading Voices, 32 influential scholars in literacy education get personal about how they have worked on ideas and how those ideas have worked on them. Together, their 2500-word essays offer never-before revealed histories of the authors’ published writing about ideas that have shaped the field of literacy education.