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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 8:2 (2018) ► pp.193–216

L3 acquisition of English attributive adjectives

Dominant language of communication matters for syntactic cross-linguistic influence

| Yazd University, Safa-ieh, Iran
| Yazd University, Safa-ieh, Iran

This study examines three L3 transfer proposals, namely the L1 Factor (Hermas, 2010, 2014a, 2014b), the CEM (Flynn et al., 2004) and the TPM (Rothman, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015) as well as investigates the role of the language of dominance in L3 acquisition of English attributive adjectives. Three groups of bilinguals took part in this study: L1 Mazandarani/L2 Persian, with Mazandarani as the dominant language of communication, L1 Mazandarani/L2 Persian, with Persian as the dominant language of communication and L1 Persian/L2 Mazandarani, with Persian as the dominant language of communication. The results of a grammaticality judgment task and an element rearrangement task show that the predictions of the above-mentioned L3 transfer proposals were not realized. Instead, the dominant language of communication turns out to be the main source of syntactic crosslinguistic influence at the initial stages of L3 acquisition, irrespective of its status as an L1 or L2.

Keywords: The L1 Factor, the CEM, the TPM, third language acquisition, CLI
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The L1 factor
    • 2.2The Cumulative Enhancement Model (CEM)
    • 2.3The Typological Proximity Model (TPM)
    • 2.4Fallah, Jabbari, and Fazilatfar’s study
  • 3.Syntax of attributive adjectives
  • 4.Hypotheses and predictions
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Tasks
      • 5.2.1Grammaticality judgment task (hereafter GJT)
      • 5.2.2Element rearrangement task (hereafter ERT)
  • 6.Results
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Declaration of Conflicting Interests
  • Funding
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16003.fal
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