Acquisition of Wh-questions in English by Persian Monolinguals and Iranian Arab Bilinguals

Abstract

This study intended to incorporate some insights to the newly-explored field of third language acquisition. To this end, it investigated the acquisition of wh-questions movements in English by 2nd and 3rd language learners within Universal Grammar (UG) structure. After taking the Nelson Proficiency Test, 102 Persian mono-lingual and Arabic-Persian bilingual learners of English were assigned to two proficiency groups. A Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) was administered to measure the subjects' performance on English difference types of wh-questions. In spite of the fact that the structure of wh-questions was similar ‎in Arabic and English, but different in Persian, the results showed no significant difference between the performance of monolinguals and bilinguals, but significant differences were found between the elementary and intermediate learners on various types of wh-questions in English. That is to say, the findings of the study regarding language transfer in 3rd language acquisition lead to the conclusion that the source of cross-linguistic effect in 3rd language acquisition is probably more of the learners' 2nd language than their 1st language.