ABSTRACT

This study sets out to investigate possible effects of previously learned languages on the acquisition of English as a third language by examining six prepositions (in, on, at, behind, over, to) when they denote spatial relations. Two picture description tasks were employed to find out which of the two known languages (L1 and/or L2) is the major source of cross-linguistic influence on the acquisition of English (L3) prepositions given the fact that adpositions have different morphosyntactic representations in Turkish, Kurdish and English. Turkish-Kurdish bilinguals learning English as a third language formed the experimental group and Turkish monolinguals learning English as a second language served as a control group in the study. The results revealed that the Turkish-Kurdish bilinguals have better performance in the comprehension and production of the target prepositions than the monolingual Turkish control group, particularly when there are structural overlaps (i.e. prepositions in both Kurdish and English) between the adpositional systems of L1-Kurdish and L3-English. The findings are suggestive of structural similarity and typological proximity as overriding factors in cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of L3 English.

摘要

这项研究着手通过检查六个介词（在，在，在，在，在，在，）表示空间关系。考虑到介词在英语中有不同的句法句法表示，使用了两个图片描述任务来找出两种已知语言（L1和/或L2）中的哪一种是英语（L3）介词习得中跨语言影响的主要来源。土耳其语，库尔德语和英语。实验组以学习英语作为第三语言的土耳其库尔德语双语者为实验组，学习英语作为第二语言的土耳其单语双语者为对照组。结果表明，土耳其-库尔德双语者在目标介词的理解和产生方面比单语土耳其对照组具有更好的表现，尤其是在存在结构重叠的情况下（即 L1-Kurdish和L3-E​​nglish的介词系统之间的介词（库尔德语和英语介词）。这些发现暗示了结构相似性和类型学上的邻近性是L3英语习得中跨语言影响中的主要因素。