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Article published In:
Conceptual transfer, (re)conceptualisation and other cognitive aspects of crosslinguistic influence in L2 acquisition
Edited by Cecilia Gunnarsson-Largy
[Language, Interaction and Acquisition 14:1] 2023
► pp. 41–74

Always trust your gut?

A case study on the differential impact of French as L1/L2 on Italian L3 tense-aspect judgments

ORCID logo | Stockholm University
| Stockholm University
The study examines how three undergraduate beginner students of Italian as L3 make sense of Italian tense-aspect morphology based on other languages. All students had knowledge of Swedish, English, and French, in each case acquired in a particular chronological order. The participants completed two C-tests and three interpretation tests of aspectual contrasts in English, French, and Italian. The latter was complemented by written comments. The results of the Italian interpretation test varied depending on tense-aspect configurations. A qualitative analysis of the comments revealed four categories of metalinguistic reflections, referring to: (i) explicit rules, (ii) intuition, (iii) other languages, and (iv) uncertain/unknown, differently distributed among the students. The results suggest that the students relied on their L1(s) as well as their L2(s) depending on type of transfer, whether linguistic or conceptual, which is discussed in light of some recent L3 models.
Keywords: conceptual/linguistic transfer, (non-)prototypical associations, Romance languages, tense-aspect, third language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tense, grammatical aspect, and lexical aspect
    • 2.1Codification of tense and aspect in French, Italian, English, and Swedish
    • 2.2Lexical aspect and prototypical/non-prototypical associations
  • 3.Models of third language acquisition
  • 4.Transfer studies on the non-native acquisition of Romance aspectual contrasts
  • 5.The study
  • 6.Data and methods of analysis
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2Tests and data collection procedures
    • 6.3Analyses of the data
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Quantitative data analysis
    • 7.2Qualitative analysis
      • 7.2.1L1SW
      • 7.2.2L1FR/SW
      • 7.2.3L1FR
  • 8.Discussion
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Author contribution
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 27 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.22020.val
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