ABSTRACT

The goal of this brief article is to highlight a specific methodological consideration pertaining to the examination of linguistic transfer in sequential language acquisition: When and how can transfer be meaningfully disentangled from issues pertaining to developmental trajectories of the target language? While this methodological issue is relevant for all transfer studies irrespective of learner type or linguistic domain of inquiry, herein we focus on a set of third language acquisition data. We examine the domain of negative quantifiers nobody/nothing and negative polarity items anybody/anything by Catalan-Spanish early bilinguals learning English as the L3 in adulthood. We offer two group analyses. The first is the superset of low beginner proficiency speakers (all participants taking part in a specially designed English course) and then a subset group (only those who were true ab initio L3 learners—that is, with no previous study of English). The analyses combine to show that exposure matters beyond proficiency—even when proficiency is held constant at very low levels, low proficiency L3 learners who have had some instruction/exposure to an L3 pattern differently from truly ab initio L3 learners. We discuss how this reality complicates isolating L3 transfer proper from effects of L3 development/acquisition and thus, by extension, to all cases of transfer such as adult and child L2.

摘要

这篇简短文章的目的是强调与顺序语言习得中的语言迁移检查有关的特定方法论考虑：何时以及如何使迁移与目标语言的发展轨迹相关的问题有意义地脱节？尽管此方法学问题与所有迁移研究均相关，而不论学习者类型或询问的语言领域如何，但在此我们重点关注一组第三语言习得数据。我们研究否定量词的领域，没人/没有和负极性项目的任何人/任何加泰罗尼亚语-西班牙语早期的双语者，成年后学习英语作为L3。我们提供两个小组分析。第一个是初学者水平较低的演讲者（所有参与者都参加了专门设计的英语课程）的超集合，然后是子集组（仅那些是真正的从头开始学习L3的人，即以前没有英语学习的人）。这些分析结合起来表明，暴露程度超出了熟练程度，即使熟练程度保持在非常低的水平，低水平的L3学习者也对L3模式有一定的指导/接触，这与真正的从头算有所不同。L3学习者。我们讨论了这个现实如何使从L3开发/获取的影响中正确隔离L3转移变得复杂，从而扩展到所有转移情况，例如成人和儿童L2。