This paper is dedicated to the investigation of receptive transfer with a special focus on the comprehension of spoken utterances in nonfamiliar Slavic languages. It investigates the possibility of applying the concept of passive multilingualism to the field of Slavic languages. It is often assumed that closely related languages provide ideal conditions for mutual intelligibility. By means of positive transfer from a previously known language of the group, one can achieve a certain degree of passive knowledge in related languages, even if these have never been learned consciously. In this paper, however, it will be shown that spontaneous intercomprehensibility of spoken utterances within the group of Slavic languages is rather restricted. After a short outline of the peculiarities of receptive and auditive transfer phenomena, as opposed to productive and written transfer, the paper provides empirical evidence for the failure of comprehension at different stages of the perception process. / Series: WU Online Papers in International Business Communication / Series One: Intercultural Communication and Language Learning

This study is anchored on two premises: First, that due to cross-linguistic interaction resulting from the interconnectedness of the different language systems in the mind of the multilingual foreign language learner, cross-linguistic influence is inevitable, and, second, that if unmanaged, this interaction might lead to erroneous deviations in the language(s) of the learner. There are studies evidencing cross-linguistic influence of English and Kiswahili on German amongst the Kenyan learners of this language. The question of the learners’ awareness of this phenomenon, however, remains unanswered. In the framework of multilingual language learning awareness, and by use of an Untimed Grammaticality Judgement test consisting of grammatical errors in German arising from cross-linguistic influence of English and Kiswahili, this study constructs explicit grammatical knowledge as an aspect of metalinguistic knowledge. It further assesses the learners’ ability to apply this knowledge in the negotiation of the presented errors as evidence of awareness of cross-linguistic influence, with the ultimate aim of establishing what constitutes the learners’ awareness of multilinguality and cross-linguistic influence of the dominant English and Kiswahili on German as a foreign language.

<p>This project examined the acquisition of third person accusative clitics in Spanish by Chinese-speaking learners. Specifically, it focused on the role of cross-linguistic influence and patterns of language exposure and use in the acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties constraining the production and intuition of overt and null clitics in Spanish. An elicited production task and an acceptability judgment task were performed on a total of 83 participants divided into four groups. A group of Chinese immigrants in Spain (n = 24), a group of classroom learners in China with study abroad experience (n = 23), and a group of learners without study abroad experience (n = 19) were compared to a group of native speakers of Spanish (n=17). The results showed that, while all the experimental groups showed knowledge of accusative clitics, their knowledge regarding the distribution of overt and null clitics was generally not related to definiteness or syntactic island. However, some participants with higher proficiency or more use of Spanish showed some sensitivity to the syntactic property of null clitics but not definiteness. Proficiency in Spanish had different effects on the immigrants and the classroom learners. Use of Spanish also played different roles between the pure classroom learners and the other two groups with naturalistic exposure. Finally, the results also showed that, while the three groups all showed influence from Chinese, the Spanish and Chinese grammars of the immigrants showed more similarity, compared to the two groups of classroom learners. Based on a proposed path of acquisition, the results were discussed in line with second language acquisition theorizing on feature accessibility and reassembly. Some implications on classroom instruction are also discussed. </p>

[pt] Este estudo investiga os comportamentos de processamento de um grupo de Brasileiros bilíngues instrucionados de português L1 e inglês L2, (n igual a 21), e um grupo de monolíngues de inglês norte-americano (n igual a 11) durante a sua compreensão de sentenças no present perfect (vs. simple past) em uma tarefa on-line de leitura auto-monitorada (Self-Paced Reading - SPR). Uma medida off-line, Tarefa de Julgamento de Aceitabilidade (Acceptability Judgment Task - AJT) foi utilizado como uma linha de base de conhcimento explícito da estrutura. Os resultados são comparados, qualitativamente, entre o grupo do monolíngue e bilíngue para investigar a sensibilidade, de cada grupo, às manipulações experimentais em tempo/aspecto, correspondência adverbial, e telicidade. O present perfect foi usado para os estímulos, pois é um tempo verbal do inglês adquirido mais tardiamente o que permite estudar as estratégias de processamento de bilíngues de nível mais avançado. Ambos os grupos foram capazes de reconhecer incongruências na atividade off-line. No entanto, o grupo monolíngue não foi sensível à condição de incongruência adverbial em tempo real, na atividade SPR. Por outro lado, o grupo bilíngue mostrou-se mais sensível a variável da incongruência adverbial, apresentando um comportamento que indica uma facilitação (automatização) de processamento da condição. O grupo monolíngue mostrou sensibilidade significativo às manipulações de telicidade em várias regiões do sintagma verbal. Diferenças entre os dois grupos foram observadas nas suas distribuições de tempos de leitura entre as condições em várias regiões da frase e elas são discutidas em termos de estratégias de processamento. Os monolíngues apresentaram efeitos de processamento integrativo no final da frase, os quais não são observados no grupo bilíngue. Atualmente, não há estudos com condições experimentais semelhantes que investiguem como os brasileiros bilíngues, avançados em inglês comportam na compreensão on-line de sentenças em inglês no present perfect. / [en] This study investigates the processing behaviors of a group of Brazilian bilingual students, instructed, advanced English students (n equal 21), and an English monolingual control group (n equal 11) during their comprehension of Present Perfect and Simple Past sentences in an on-line, self-paced reading (SPR) task. An off-line Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) provides a baseline measure of explicit knowledge in order to validate the on-line results. The results are compared, qualitatively, between the bilingual and monolingual groups in order to investigate their sensitivity to experimental manipulations in Tense/Aspect, adverbial (Mis)match, and Telicity. The Present Perfect was used for the stimuli as it is a late-acquired feature of English which allows for the study of processing strategy of advanced level students. While both groups were able to recognize Mismatches off-line, monolinguals were not sensitive to the Mismatch condition in the on-line experiment. Surprisingly, the bilingual group showed more sensitivity to the adverbial Match variable, showing a processing facilitation in the Match condition as well as some mismatch sensitivity as well. The monolingual group showed significant effects for Telicity at multiple sentence regions. Some qualitative differences were seen between the two groups in their reading-time contours across the verb phrase. The monolinguals show within-group consistency across multiple conditions and signs of integrative processing (wrap-up) effects in their processing patterns which are not seen among the bilingual group. There are currently no studies with similar experimental conditions which investigate the on-line comprehension of the English Present Perfect with Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals in comparison to American English monolinguals.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo investigar, a partir de uma abordagem plurilíngue, a influência que a língua inglesa exerce no processo de ensino/aprendizagem de alemão como segunda língua estrangeira para aprendizes brasileiros. Os principais questionamentos da pesquisa se concentram nos processos de transferência linguística positiva e de interferência observados na aprendizagem dos alunos em nível inicial, tendo em vista que as línguas anteriormente aprendidas, principalmente a inglesa, possuem grande potencial de influenciar sua(s) língua(s) subsequente(s). A partir de pesquisas nas áreas de ensino/aprendizagem de alemão como L3 e Alemão após Inglês foi elaborado um questionário de pesquisa respondido por 50 informantes dos níveis A1 a B1 do Quadro Europeu Comum de Referência para as Línguas, alunos do curso de línguas Alemão no Campus, ministrado pela Área de Alemão da Universidade de São Paulo. O questionário foi composto de três partes, referindo-se a primeira às informações sobre o repertório linguístico dos aprendizes, a segunda às percepções e crenças sobre seu processo de aprendizagem, em especial quando da aprendizagem de línguas de parentesco comprovado e a terceira parte a uma produção textual, que teve como objetivo coletar material linguístico genuíno dos aprendizes para, posteriormente, identificar empiricamente alguns de seus desvios linguísticos. A partir da revisão da literatura e da análise dos questionários, a premissa de que o inglês exerce um papel importante na aprendizagem do alemão pôde ser confirmada, sendo o parentesco etimológico um dos mais importantes fatores na determinação da ocorrência de influência interlinguística. Ademais, os aprendizes foram capazes de identificar corretamente as áreas nas quais o conhecimento prévio do inglês funciona como um auxílio (p.ex. compreensão de vocabulário) e as áreas de dificuldade (p.ex. pronúncia), fazendo uso das estratégias de aprendizagem que envolvem a comparação de sistemas linguísticos em sua produção linguística. Entretanto, a interferência linguística advinda do emprego dessas estratégias sugere o desenvolvimento, por professores brasileiros, de uma didática plurilíngue que englobe novos métodos para o ensino de língua alemã como segunda língua estrangeira. / The present work aims at the investigation of the influence that the English language exerts on the learning/teaching process of German as a second foreign language for Brazilian learners in a plurilingual approach. The main questions of the research focus on positive transfer processes as well as linguistic interference observed in initial level learners, taking into consideration that the previously learned languages, mainly English, have a great potential to influence subsequent foreign languages. Based on studies in the areas of teaching and learning of German as an L3 and German after English, a research questionnaire was designed and subsequently responded by a group of 50 learners, levels A1 to B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, all of them students of the language course named Alemão no Campus, given by the German department at the University of São Paulo. The questionnaire was composed of three parts. The first part refers to the information about the linguistic repertoire of the investigated group; the second one investigates the perceptions and beliefs that learners have about their learning process, especially when they are learning languages of the same linguistic family; and the third part consists of a textual production, that had as its main goal collecting genuine linguistic material of these learners in a way that, later, this material could be used in order to identify, empirically, some of the linguistic deviations. From the literature review and the questionnaires analysis, the assumption that English exerts an important role in the learning process of German could be confirmed, being the etymological relationship between languages one of the most important elements in order to determine the occurrence of cross-linguistic influence. Furthermore, the learners were able to accurately identify the areas in which the previous knowledge of English operates as a helpful tool for the learners (e.g. vocabulary comprehension) and the difficulty areas (e.g. pronunciation), making use of those learning strategies that involve the comparison of linguistic systems in their production. Nevertheless, the linguistic interference that results from the employment of these strategies suggests the development, by Brazilian teachers, of a plurilingualism didactics that includes new methods for the teaching/learning of German as a second foreign language.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo investigar, a partir de uma abordagem plurilíngue, a influência que a língua inglesa exerce no processo de ensino/aprendizagem de alemão como segunda língua estrangeira para aprendizes brasileiros. Os principais questionamentos da pesquisa se concentram nos processos de transferência linguística positiva e de interferência observados na aprendizagem dos alunos em nível inicial, tendo em vista que as línguas anteriormente aprendidas, principalmente a inglesa, possuem grande potencial de influenciar sua(s) língua(s) subsequente(s). A partir de pesquisas nas áreas de ensino/aprendizagem de alemão como L3 e Alemão após Inglês foi elaborado um questionário de pesquisa respondido por 50 informantes dos níveis A1 a B1 do Quadro Europeu Comum de Referência para as Línguas, alunos do curso de línguas Alemão no Campus, ministrado pela Área de Alemão da Universidade de São Paulo. O questionário foi composto de três partes, referindo-se a primeira às informações sobre o repertório linguístico dos aprendizes, a segunda às percepções e crenças sobre seu processo de aprendizagem, em especial quando da aprendizagem de línguas de parentesco comprovado e a terceira parte a uma produção textual, que teve como objetivo coletar material linguístico genuíno dos aprendizes para, posteriormente, identificar empiricamente alguns de seus desvios linguísticos. A partir da revisão da literatura e da análise dos questionários, a premissa de que o inglês exerce um papel importante na aprendizagem do alemão pôde ser confirmada, sendo o parentesco etimológico um dos mais importantes fatores na determinação da ocorrência de influência interlinguística. Ademais, os aprendizes foram capazes de identificar corretamente as áreas nas quais o conhecimento prévio do inglês funciona como um auxílio (p.ex. compreensão de vocabulário) e as áreas de dificuldade (p.ex. pronúncia), fazendo uso das estratégias de aprendizagem que envolvem a comparação de sistemas linguísticos em sua produção linguística. Entretanto, a interferência linguística advinda do emprego dessas estratégias sugere o desenvolvimento, por professores brasileiros, de uma didática plurilíngue que englobe novos métodos para o ensino de língua alemã como segunda língua estrangeira. / The present work aims at the investigation of the influence that the English language exerts on the learning/teaching process of German as a second foreign language for Brazilian learners in a plurilingual approach. The main questions of the research focus on positive transfer processes as well as linguistic interference observed in initial level learners, taking into consideration that the previously learned languages, mainly English, have a great potential to influence subsequent foreign languages. Based on studies in the areas of teaching and learning of German as an L3 and German after English, a research questionnaire was designed and subsequently responded by a group of 50 learners, levels A1 to B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, all of them students of the language course named Alemão no Campus, given by the German department at the University of São Paulo. The questionnaire was composed of three parts. The first part refers to the information about the linguistic repertoire of the investigated group; the second one investigates the perceptions and beliefs that learners have about their learning process, especially when they are learning languages of the same linguistic family; and the third part consists of a textual production, that had as its main goal collecting genuine linguistic material of these learners in a way that, later, this material could be used in order to identify, empirically, some of the linguistic deviations. From the literature review and the questionnaires analysis, the assumption that English exerts an important role in the learning process of German could be confirmed, being the etymological relationship between languages one of the most important elements in order to determine the occurrence of cross-linguistic influence. Furthermore, the learners were able to accurately identify the areas in which the previous knowledge of English operates as a helpful tool for the learners (e.g. vocabulary comprehension) and the difficulty areas (e.g. pronunciation), making use of those learning strategies that involve the comparison of linguistic systems in their production. Nevertheless, the linguistic interference that results from the employment of these strategies suggests the development, by Brazilian teachers, of a plurilingualism didactics that includes new methods for the teaching/learning of German as a second foreign language.

This empirical study investigates how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Swedish upper secondary schools succeed in their use of English prepositions. EFL learners in Sweden today represent a multitude of nationalities and ethnic groups with many different first languages (L1); therefore, English teaching could be subject to change in order to adapt to the new situation. The study is based on an online survey given to pupils taking “English 7” at upper secondary schools in Stockholm. The study aims to find patterns in how pupils with Swedish as their L1 handle English prepositions and use a control group consisting of pupils with another L1 in a comparative analysis based on language transfer. A teacher of English at the respondents’ school was interviewed to elicit teaching methodology and how they use the language diversity in the classroom when teaching prepositions. Even though it was hypothesised that negative language transfer was a factor, the analysis of the focus group shows that negative language transfer from Swedish did not inhibit the focus group’s ability to choose prepositions compared to the control group in the given context. In contrast, positive transfer from Swedish as an L1 contributed to a substantial increase in success rate. However, no clear connection could be made to teaching methodology as the interviewed teacher did not have any specific method for dealing with prepositions and mainly treated teaching prepositions implicitly. Furthermore, the interviewed teacher did not use language diversity in classroom as a tool for learning.

My aim with this study is to investigate the teaching strategies applied in teaching English to students with another mother tongue than Swedish. According to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory, factors such as age, language competence and mother tongue influence can affect language acquisition. SLA theory also states that multilinguals tend to select one of their languages as their primary source of information and this language is the language that most resembles the target language; Swedish and English are both Germanic languages and therefore share language closeness. Results showed that regardless of age and mother tongue, equal numbers of students chose to source Swedish only or both Swedish and their mother tongue when translating texts from English; only 3 chose to source their mother tongue only. There is to date little research that directly connects teaching approaches with SLA, particularly when dealing with multilingualism. I believe a potential area for research could be to investigate the possibility of developing teaching strategies that can potentially harness prior language knowledge. My investigation also showed that English is taught to native and non-native Swedish speakers alike through the medium of the Swedish language; that is to say the course books consist of English text with vocabulary translations and grammatical exercises from Swedish to English. A suggestion would be to reduce the use of the English to Swedish translation methods, particularly for students with a limited knowledge of Swedish, and incorporate into lessons more communicative teaching methods using authentic materials and real situations.

Cette thèse se consacre aux enjeux de la polysémie verbale pour l’acquisition des langues secondes. Nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement à la polysémie du verbe prendre. Cette thèse poursuit deux objectifs complémentaires. D’une part, notre premier objectif est de décrire la polysémie du verbe prendre au moyen d’une analyse en sémantique lexicale dans une approche cognitive. D’autre part, notre second objectif est d’évaluer l’incidence de la polysémie du verbe prendre sur les connaissances qu’ont les apprenants de ce verbe et d’isoler les différentes acceptions de prendre mises au jour par notre analyse sémantique, qui s’avèrent problématiques pour les apprenants du français L2. Par ailleurs, nous cherchons également à savoir si les problèmes liés à la polysémie chez les anglophones peuvent être liés à l’influence translangagière.L’analyse sémantique du verbe prendre porte sur l’ensemble des acceptions prédicatives du verbe. Notre corpus d’analyse provient de données lexicales issues de plusieurs dictionnaires de référence. Afin de délimiter le corpus d’acceptions soumis à l’analyse sémantique, nous avons effectué une analyse syntaxique permettant de départager les différents emplois du verbe prendre : les constructions à verbe support, les locutions verbales et les acceptions prédicatives. Puis, nous proposons une analyse sémantique monosémique des acceptions prédicatives du verbe prendre qui s’articule autour d’un noyau de sens tripartite qui ne correspond à aucune des acceptions spécifiques du verbe, mais qui est présent dans l’ensemble de ces acceptions. Chacune des parties du noyau de sens peut faire l’objet d’un fenêtrage de l’attention, qui nous permet de mettre au jour les différents sens du verbe. Nous avons également émis des hypothèses sur les différences entre le verbe prendre et ses équivalents en anglais. Pour atteindre le second objectif de notre travail, nous avons mené une expérimentation auprès de 191 apprenants du français langue seconde. Tous les participants ont complété trois tâches expérimentales : un test de closure afin de mesurer leur niveau de compétence langagière en français, une tâche de production écrite et une tâche de jugement d’acceptabilité. Les résultats des analyses de régression logistique et multinomiale montrent non seulement que l’analyse sémantique que nous avons proposée permet de prédire la connaissance des différentes acceptions du verbe par les apprenants du français L2, mais aussi que les apprenants anglophones et allophones ont un comportement différent par rapport aux types d’acceptions du verbe prendre, comportement que nous avons pu expliquer par l’influence translangagière chez les participants anglophones. / The present dissertation focuses on the acquisition of highly polysemous verbs by French as a second language learners. I am particularly interested in the polysemy of the verb prendre. This dissertation has two complementary objectives. On the one hand, the first objective is to describe the polysemy of prendre through a lexical semantic analysis within a cognitive framework. On the other hand, the second objective is to evaluate the impact of this polysemy on learners' knowledge of the verb’s different senses in order to isolate those which are the most problematic for French L2 learners. Furthermore, I also investigate whether the problems associated with polysemy for Anglophone learners can be explained through cross-linguistic influence. The semantic analysis of the verb prendre describes all the predicative uses of the verb and is based on lexical data from several dictionnaires. Prior to carrying out the semantic analysis, a battery of syntactic tests was used in order to categorize the different uses of the verb prendre into the following categories: support verb constructions, idiomatic expressions and predicative uses. I propose that the verb prendre has an abstract core meaning which can be divided into three parts. While this abstract core meaning does not correspond to any of the specific senses of the verb, it is present in all of them. I use the cognitive semantic concept of the windowing of attention in order to explain how each of the parts of the core meaning can be windowed in order to obtain the different senses of the verb. Moreover, this analysis allowed me to formulated hypotheses about the differences between the verb prendre and its equivalents in English.In order to meet the second objective of this dissertation, I conducted an experiment on 191 learners of French as a second language. All participants completed three tasks: a cloze test to measure their proficiency level in French, a guided written production task and an acceptability judgement task. The results of the logistic and multinomial regression analyses show not only that the semantic analysis proposed can predict participants’ knowledge of the different senses of the verb, but also that participants whose first language is English behave differently from those whose first language is another language, confirming the presence of cross-linguistic influence for the English-speaking participants.

In the present study, the linguistic performance of 11 Swedish high-school students of Spanish as second language (L2)/foreign language (FL) of 3 different levels, between 16-18 years old, has been measured through analysis of experimental elicited speech samples from a picture description task, designed to elicit placement of adjectives and dimensional adjectives in Spanish. The task provided 3 images with phrases in the source language and the participants were asked to translate it into the target language (TL). Subsequently, 9 images without text were presented and the students were asked to describe the images in the TL. The intention was to measure the grammatical accuracy concerning the placement of adjectives and the possible transfer –from Swedish to Spanish– of semantical markers regarding dimensional adjectives. The results from the performance analysis of the learners responses indicate that in beginner learners of Spanish, the semantic markers of dimensional adjectives have been transferred from Swedish to Spanish. One example that reflects this is the predominant use of the form largo ‘long’ instead of alto ’high/tall’ regarding the height of a person. The beginners also exhibit transfer in the placement of adjectives. These types of errors found in the speech of beginner students were not salient to the same extent in more advanced students.