This dissertation investigates interlanguage influence, i.e. the influence of one or more non-native language on the production of a third or additional language. A qualitative and a quantitative study were conducted with speakers of Italian as third or additional language with English, Spanish or French as native or non-native languages. Subjects of Study 1 are a French Ll speaker and an English Ll speaker. Subjects of Study 2 are 238 Spanish L1 speakers and 130 English Ll speakers. Combining a traditional Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) approach with theories of L 1, L2 and L3 production, we examine the role of crosslinguistic phonological activation during on-line processing and the effect of recency of activation on written production. It is argued that the process of transfer may be constrained by underlying crosslinguistic activation during on-line processing and that the incorporation of non-target lexicon into production may be influenced by the recent activation of a non-native language fonnally dissimilar to the intended target. We also hypothesise the existence of a cognitive process which we refer to as 'system shift' by which learners may transfer a lexical unit from one non-native language to another and then fail to recognize the source of their knowledge in the original linguistic system. We further propose two principles that interact in blocking Ll transfer: perception of correctness and association of foreignness. We also examine the relationship between the incorporation of non-target function words and the rate of subject insertion and omission in written production. Results show the rate of subject insertion to be significantly higher in the texts of English L1 and Spanish LI speakers with knowledge of French as a non-native language. We discuss the implications of our findings for a general and comprehensive theory of CLI

Abstract Acquiring communicative competence and the ability to communicate in writing are essential goals for second language learners and of the highest importance to achieving educational success.  Opportunities to express ideas in writing are essential for students’ language development. Learners therefore need to be encouraged to take the risk of making errors in order to be able to express ideas, thoughts and knowledge with enthusiasm. This thesis defines and investigates some important factors contributing to the development of communicative competence and performance in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).  The main aim of the study is to focus on how Swedish learners make use of their first language (L1) as a cognitive and strategic source in their written English communication.  Cross-linguistic influence, or transfer errors, from Swedish in the written English of high school students are taken from samples of writing from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC).  The study evaluates the potential of transfer from the L1 to either facilitate or inhibit the communicative purpose, i.e., ‘getting the message across’. The most serious errors in the data were found to result in confusing, inappropriate or incomprehensible structures.  Finally, the study draws attention to some aspects of communicative language teaching and learning that teachers should be aware of in the development and assessment of students’ communicative ability in written performance. The study found that negative language transfer was found to affect communication to various degrees of seriousness but could at times also be considered a useful and necessary strategy for getting a message across.  Transfer errors were often idiosyncratic and were most frequent among males between 16-17 years-old enrolled in vocational programmes.  Prepositional transfer errors were the most common, however; incorrectly used lexical items, in particular, false friends and other vocabulary substitutions, as well as literal translations of phrases and idiomatic expressions potentially resulted in the most serious errors.  Word order errors also interfered substantially with the message in many cases.  On the other hand, grammatical transfer errors such as incorrect us of articles, pluralisation and verb tense generally did not change the meaning to any greater extent.  In fact, transfer errors can be communicative as long as the message gets across.

This study assesses the scope of the Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) hypothesis’ predictions with regard to early bilingual acquisition. To this end, we analyze longitudinal corpus data from four bilinguals attesting the acquisition of subjecthood (null versus overt; preverbal versus postverbal) and the pragmatic adequacy of early null and overt subjects in a null-subject language (i.e., Spanish) in combination with a language differing in its pro-drop parameter setting (i.e., English). Our results indicate that CLI barely affects the development of subjects in the null-subject language at the initial stages, namely at the outset of null and overt subjects, and in turn support the Separate Development Hypothesis. Our bilingual cohort patterns with their Spanish-acquiring monolingual peer in that both groups display comparable proportions of null subjects as well as acquisitional trajectories of null and overt subjects at the early stages of acquisition. Much like monolinguals, bilinguals begin to produce preverbal and postverbal subjects concurrently. The bilingual children and the monolingual child of this study actually produce extremely high rates of pragmatically appropriate covert and overt subjects, which are for the most part target-like from the start, thus pointing to the absence of CLI effects. In light of monolingual and bilingual data, the paper also revisits the hotly debated issue of the ‘no overt subject’ stage of Grinstead (1998, et seq.), its existence in child Spanish being questionable.

Since the 1990s, the number of U.S. students enrolled in university-level Chinese language classes has grown exponentially. Learning Chinese has become increasingly important to those students’ academic studies, professional success, and personal development. However, despite these students’ eagerness to master Chinese, they face an inevitable challenge to their progress: developing reading fluency and comprehension skills in Chinese. A common experience among those students is that learning to read in Chinese is labor-intensive and frustrating, and it takes much longer than the time they would have to spend on learning to read in alphabetic languages such as Spanish, French, and German. In response to this issue, a small but growing body of research has started to investigate the ways American learners view and comprehend Chinese texts. To contribute to this line of research, the present study examined the process of reading Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese reading). In particular, this study looked closely into the following key questions: (1) What strategies did L2 Chinese readers use when reading a Chinese expository text? (2) What difficulties did they encounter and how did they solve these problems? (3) What factors influenced their reading process? (4) When, how and why did they shift to thinking in their native language, English? To describe these readers’ approaches to text comprehension and also to understand their own perceptions, this study adopted a few qualitative research methods, including think-aloud reports, recall protocols, post-reading interviews, semi-structured interviews and background surveys. Participants of this study were five American students enrolled in intermediate- and advanced-level Chinese language classes at a Midwest U.S. university. Data collected from these participants were analyzed qualitatively through both an intuitive, holistic approach and a structured, systematic approach. A qualitative data analysis software—NVivo 12—was used to facilitate the coding and analysis process. Results of the study show that L2 (Chinese) reading is primarily a language-based, cognitive-constrained, and individualized process that involves multiple interactive factors. Those factors include but are not limited to linguistic, psychological, textual, environmental, and background factors. In addition, regarding the use of the native language in L2 reading, results of the study show that readers’ L2 language proficiency influences the frequency and effectiveness of their use of their native language. The ways of using the native language also differed across readers with different L2 language proficiencies and reading styles. These results have implications for theories of L2 reading in general and theories of L2 Chinese reading in particular. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also discussed at the end of the dissertation.

This study explores how bilingualism impacts lexical selection within spontaneous spoken language production. The particular analysis focuses on the choice between synonymous verbs in English. The main hypothesis predicts that, as a result of crosslinguistic influence, bilingual speakers of French and English will opt for the English synonym which has structural correspondence to the French translation equivalent more often than monolingual speakers, who do not experience an influence from French. Structural correspondence exists in two distinct ways: in the form of cognates (e.g., applaudir/applaud vs. clap) and in terms of the number of free morphemes used to convey the same semantic information (e.g., lever/raise vs. put up). The language production data was generated by participants viewing video scenes and describing the action as it progressed. The frequency with which the different verbs were used was then compared across the different participant groups: monolingual English speakers and bilingual speakers of both French and English. The bilingual group was also subdivided based on language dominance. A range of different analyses were conducted. A framework is established for interpreting the data. Bilingualism can have one of three main effects on the speech of bilinguals relative to monolinguals: (a) an expanding effect, in which bilinguals use a wider range of lexical forms than monolinguals, (b) a limiting effect, in which bilinguals use a more limited range of lexical items than bilinguals, and (c) a modifying effect, in which the range of lexical items is basically the same between bilinguals and monolinguals but varies in terms of the frequency with which those lexical forms are used (a type of CLI labeled covert). These effects interact with certain speaker variables such as which language is the speakers dominant language. The stage(s) within the language production process at which CLI impacts ultimate lexicalization is also explored. Current models of language production which focus on lexical selection are discussed. The results of this study are most compatible with specific notions such as lexical access being target-language non-specific (see Costa, 2004, for example) and the Weaker Links Hypothesis (e.g., Gollan and Silverberg, 2001; Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002).

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Notre recherche doctorale, qui s’inscrit dans le champ de l’acquisition d’une troisième langue et du plurilinguisme, a pour objectif d’apporter une meilleure compréhension du fonctionnement de la compétence plurilingue. Elle cherche plus particulièrement à déterminer si les langues d’un plurilingue jouent des rôles distincts dans l’acquisition d’une nouvelle langue au niveau des interactions translinguistiques lexicales et syntaxiques et si ces phénomènes sont associés. Elle examine également les activités métalinguistiques et translinguistiques permettant aux apprenants de gérer et d’appréhender la langue cible. Pour ce faire, nous avons réalisé onze études de cas de locuteurs de l’espagnol et de l’anglais avec des niveaux variés en français L3+. Ces participants ont été soumis à trois tâches de production orale. Afin prendre en compte la nature complexe des interactions lorsque les langues en contact sont typologiquement proches et lorsque différents domaines linguistiques sont examinés, nous avons adopté une approche mêlant travaux menés dans le champ de l’acquisition d’une L3 à ceux menés dans l’étude des contacts de langues. Par le biais d’une analyse quantitative et qualitative, notre travail a mis en évidence le fonctionnement de la compétence plurilingue de nos participants. Ils activent en effet toutes leurs langues à des degrés divers, au niveau de différents types d’ITL, propriétés syntaxiques et domaines linguistiques. Nos participants mobilisent, par ailleurs, leur conscience métalinguistique et translinguistique afin de mieux appréhender la LC et gérer leur production en recourant à des cognats, à des consultations translinguistiques et à des inférences. / This research is set within the fields of third language acquisition and multilingualism with a focus on developing our understanding of how multilingual competence functions. The research attempts to determine if the languages of a multilingual play distinctive roles in the acquisition of a new language specifically regarding the lexical and syntactic components in crosslinguistic interactions, and whether there is convergence between these phenomena. The research also examines the metalinguistic and crosslinguistic activities which allow learners to manage and comprehend the target language. The data for this research was collected from eleven case studies of speakers of Spanish and English with a variety of levels of proficiency in French. Participants were required to complete three speaking tasks. Approaches sourced from research from the fields of third language acquisition and language contact were utilised and developed to capture the complexity of the interactions, the typological relationship among the languages in contact, and the varying levels of the languages under examination. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis this research demonstrates how multilingual competence operates. The data indicates that participants activate all their languages to different degrees relating to different types of crosslinguistic interactions, syntactic properties and level of language. Participants also typically resort to their metalinguistic and crosslinguistic awareness to help them comprehend the target language and manage their output by the use of cognates, crosslinguistic consultations and inferences.

This study aims to explore how English-speaking learners of Chinese acquire Resultative Verb Compounds (RVC). The specific research questions are: Do learners think that change of state is achieved by using an RVC? Do learners assign resultative meaning to V₁-le uniformly or only in certain types of situations depending on how result is expressed in their L1? Lastly, do learners realize that RVCs are a highly productive construction? This thesis provides linguistic analysis that can account for differences in how change of state is expressed in Chinese and English. It also presents a second language acquisition study informed primarily by the sentence acceptability judgement task. In English, result is typically expressed by a monomorphemic verb or by a resultative construction. In Mandarin, the most typical way to convey result is to use RVCs. In addition to differences in such phenomena as event conflation, strength of implicature and the incompleteness effect also constitute key differences between English and Mandarin. It is claimed that the major factor in determining the effect of L1 transfer from English to Mandarin is how change-of-state situations are expressed in English. In response, two experiments were conducted. The subjects were 47 learners and 26 native speakers of Chinese. Statistical analysis (ANOVA) was applied in evaluating outcomes of the experiments. The results show that learners understand that RVCs must be used to describe change-of-state situations. However, learners do not habitually take the aspect marker–le as a resultative marker. Instead, the outcomes of the data analysis are compatible with the interpretation of–le as a past tense marker. The analysis also shows that how change-of-state situations with respect to event conflation are expressed in English has some effect on their understanding of RVC-le vs. V₁-le combinations. Lastly, while learners do not reject the idea that more than one RVC can describe a change-of-state event, they do not have full understanding of this phenomenon.

Dans cet ouvrage, nous nous donnons pour tâche d’investiguer la nature et le rôle du transfert interlingual dans le traitement du passé composé et de l’imparfait en français par les étudiants akanophones du FLE, scolarisés en anglais. À la base d’un cadre construit sur les théories cognitives de Langacker (1986, 2008) et de Talmy (2000a, 2000b) sur l’aspect, ainsi que celles de Jakobson (1959) et de Catford (1965) sur l’équivalence, des données ont été collectées auprès de 57 sujets dans deux universités publiques du Ghana. Les analyses faites à l’aide du PSPP révèlent une tendance de transférer les caractéristiques aspectuo-temporelles du verbe anglais au verbe français chez les participants, menant à une mauvaise interprétation des deux temps. La connaissance de l'akan n'y joue aucun rôle. Nous recommandons que les enseignants fassent référence aux L1 lors de l’introduction des nouveaux concepts, entre autres. / This research studies the nature and the extent of the challenges students face with passé composé and imparfait as regards aspect. We investigate the respective roles of Akan, an aspectual language, and of English, a more temporal language in relation to these challenges. Stratified random sampling was employed in data collection among up to 57 students Toolsemployed were interviews, questionnaires and translation tests.The data was analysed with PSPP and discussed within a framework of the cognitive theories of Langacker (1986, 2008) and Talmy (2000a, 2000b), and Jakobson's (1959) et Catford's (1965) theories of equivalence. Results show that Akanophone students of French superimpose TAM featues of English on these French tenses and thus misinterpret them. Learners' background knowledge of Akan plays no role in these operations. We recommend that teachers of French refer to knowledge of L1 in introducing new concepts.

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