Part of
Third Language Acquisition in AdulthoodEdited by Jennifer Cabrelli, Suzanne Flynn and Jason Rothman
[Studies in Bilingualism 46] 2012
► pp. 195–222
Edited by Jennifer Cabrelli, Suzanne Flynn and Jason Rothman
[Studies in Bilingualism 46] 2012
► pp. 195–222
Examining the role of L2 syntactic development in L3 acquisition
A look at relative clauses
We examine the role of L2 syntactic development in L3 acquisition. Participants included 132 L3 learners of English (L2 Russian/L1 Tuvan) and 20 L2 learners of English (L1 Russian). The study focused on the comprehension of coordinate clauses and relative clauses, structures which are similar in Russian and English; L3 learners were tested in both languages. Results for the L3 learners showed that better performance in L2 Russian led to better performance on L3 English coordinate clauses. However, performance on L3 English relative clauses was better predicted by level of English proficiency than L2 Russian syntactic development. We propose that morphosyntactic differences between the L2/L3 can hinder the potential for facilitation between languages despite similarities at the level of syntax.
Cited by
Cited by 12 other publications
Albirini, Abdulkafi
2014. The Role of the Colloquial Varieties in the Acquisition of the Standard Variety: The Case of Arabic Heritage Speakers. Foreign Language Annals 47:3 ► pp. 447 ff. 
Benmamoun, Elabbas & Abdulkafi Albirini
2018. IS LEARNING A STANDARD VARIETY SIMILAR TO LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE?. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 40:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Gabriele, Alison
2021. Microvariation and transfer in L2 and L3 acquisition. Second Language Research 37:3 ► pp. 453 ff.
Marciszewska, Agnieszka A
2021. L3 morphosyntactic processing among Polish–English bilinguals: Considering learners’ level of bilingualism and language dominance. Open Linguistics 7:1 ► pp. 353 ff.
Puig-Mayenco, Eloi, Jorge González Alonso & Jason Rothman
2020. A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition. Second Language Research 36:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Puig-Mayenco, Eloi & Heather Marsden
2018. Polarity-item anything in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish?. Second Language Research 34:4 ► pp. 487 ff.
Ramos Feijoo, Jon & María del Pilar García Mayo
2023. The acquisition of relative clauses by Spanish-Basque learners of L3 English: does dominance play a role?. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 61:3 ► pp. 1051 ff.
ROTHMAN, JASON
2015. Linguistic and cognitive motivations for the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) of third language (L3) transfer: Timing of acquisition and proficiency considered. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18:2 ► pp. 179 ff.
Rothman, Jason, José Alemán Bañón & Jorge González Alonso
2015. Neurolinguistic measures of typological effects in multilingual transfer: introducing an ERP methodology. Frontiers in Psychology 6
Rothman, Jason, Jorge González Alonso & Eloi Puig-Mayenco
2019. Third Language Acquisition and Linguistic Transfer,
Sadeghi, Karim
2022. Morphosyntactic Processing in SLA: An Interview with Alison Gabriele. In Talking About Second Language Acquisition, ► pp. 105 ff.
Westergaard, Marit
2021. L3 acquisition and crosslinguistic influence as co-activation: Response to commentaries on the keynote ‘Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition’. Second Language Research 37:3 ► pp. 501 ff.
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