How the languages a bilingual speaks influence learning a third language

What is it about?

When there is influence from a previously acquired language into a new language, it is called Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI). An example of this might be a Polish speaker learning English, and having trouble with the article system (i.e., 'a', 'the'), because articles do not exist in Polish. Another example might be an English speaker learning Polish and finding difficulty using the case system (endings on nouns which indicate their role in a sentence). This paper investigates CLI from a bilingual's two previously acquired languages (Polish and English) into a third language (Norwegian). Specifically, it examines the roles of language dominance and recency (language of instruction in the experiment) across four different grammatical properties: articles, ditransitives, number agreement, and semantic gender. Results showed complex relationships between these variables, discussed in light of a foreign language effect, differential cognitive control, language domains, and previous third-language studies.

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Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper matters because it directly explores factors in third-language acquisition (L3A) that have thus far been relatively ancillary. Much of the literature thus far focuses on linguistic cues, with little emphasis on experience-based factors like language dominance. There is also very little literature on the role of instruction language in experiments, and L3A papers often take participant performance on one linguistic property to inform theory-building. In this paper, we find that participants make different choices for different linguistic properties. This indicates that it is important for researchers to consider a range of properties, as they may provide different results, to fully understand the phenomena at hand. Regarding dominance, we find evidence of an inhibition of the dominant language, as well as an effect of cognitive similarity between the second and third language in participants dominant in their first language. We also find differing participant behaviour based on the language of instruction, which is an important consideration for both language teachers and researchers when designing future research experiments.

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