tla.lexicon

Lexicon

TLA Research at the Lexical level• the most investigated linguistic area • non-native influence is especially visible at

the level of vocabulary

WHY?• Evidence of non-native information is

mostly overt and easily recognizable (DeAngelis, 2007)

Astrid Stedje (1977)

• pioneer studies on L3 Acquisition: lexical transfer into L3 German.

• one of first studies to point out that transfer from one foreign language to another is also possible

• The 55 participants of L1 Finnish/L2 Swedish, transferred function words from their L2 more often than they did from their L1

Ringbom (1987)

• one of the most comprehensive studies on non-native linguistic influence to this date

• collected 11,000 essays written in L3 English by Finnish students of Finnish L1 and Swedish L1

Ringbom (1987): Findings

• several instances of non-native linguistic influence: referred to as borrowing and lexical transfer

CONCLUSIONS:• L3 learners often transfer ‘form’ from the

L2 and rarely or never do they transfer ‘meaning’

Why form and not meaning?

Possible explanation Ellis (1994, 1997) :

• learning the semantic interpretation of a word is more intellectually demanding since it necessarily involves conscious and explicit learning, whereas the acquisition of form is essentially implicit and unconscious learning.

L3 Processing of Vocabulary

•Magiste (1979, 1986): one of the first studies to look at multilingual processing

• Testing: a number of speeded tasks such as word, number and picture naming as well as some decoding tasks.

Magiste (1986)

Results: • trilinguals were slower at decoding for

word naming as well as some of the decoding tasks. • bilinguals and monolinguals were slower

on the naming tasks.

More Processing

• Van Gelderen et al. (2003)

Participants:• Dutch monolingual and bilingual teenagers

(of Turkish, Maroccan or Surinam background) learning English.

Testing:• word recognition tasks

Van Gelderen et al. Results

• Although by a very small difference, the results showed that bilinguals were slower in their L2 Dutch and L3 English than monolinguals were.

Crosslinguistic Influence

Three main types of CLI at the lexical level:

1. pure code switching

2. False Friends

3. Word Construction

Pure Codeswitching

• the borrowing and inclusion of entire words from one language into another)

Example: Bardel and Falk (2007) • interaction between the speaker’s German

L1, English L2 and Swedish L3

EXAMPLE:Isn’t it tycka heisst doch denken?Isn’t it think means MODAL PARTICLE think?(“tycka”: Swedish L3, “heisst doch denken”: German L1)

False Friends

•words from the background language(s) that are phonologically and/or orthographically identical to the target language.

Example: Bardel (2011)

• native speakers of Swedish who often use the English word “eventually” in the sense of maybe/possibly

• influence could come from L1 Swedish, since the Swedish word “eventuellt” does have the meaning of maybe/possibly

Example: Bardel (2011)

HOWEVER,

• transfer could also be another one of the languages known by the speaker such as Italian and French where “eventuellt” is a true friend for the Italian “eventualmente” and the French “eventuellement”.

Word Construction

• the process by which words from either background language(s) are adapted and included into the target language at the morphological as well as phonological level.

Example: Lindqvist (2006)

• from L3 French, Swedish L1 and English L2.

• Speakers commonly use *grades in the target language that comes from the English grades.

• The correct target language form should be: notes.

Example 2: Bardel and Lindqvist (2007)

• L3 Italian where French is the source language for transfer

• *esciarpa, from the French ‘écharpe’ and English ‘scarf’

• the correct Italian word is ‘sciarpa’