Influence of L1/L2 linguistic knowledge on the acquisition of L3 Spanish past tense morphology among L1 German speakers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building up on studies that have revealed L2 transfer of imperfective meaning from one Romance language into another [Salaberry, M. R. (2005). Evidence for transfer of knowledge of aspect from L2 Spanish to L3 Portuguese. In D. Ayoun & R. Salaberry (Eds.), Tense and aspect in romance languages: Theoretical and applied perspectives (pp. 179–210). Benjamins; Foote, R. (2009). Transfer in L3 acquisition: The role of typology. In Y. I. Leung (Ed.), Third language acquisition and universal grammar (pp. 89–114). Multilingual Matters.], we analysed data from 73 German-speaking learners (subdivided into three groups according to their proficiency in another Romance language as L2) and 149 Spanish native speakers using a written completion task. Findings show that learners with a high L2 proficiency tend to match the choices of the native speaker group in prototypical contexts (e.g. Preterite with telic predicates), but not in non-prototypical contexts (telic predicates in the background). This indicates that L2 knowledge is beneficial only for those conditions which do not require high processing costs. In turn, in non-prototypical contexts, speakers must process conflicting features that represent ‘deep’ conceptual components of the language. We conclude that processing of these cases has not been successfully acquired in the L2 and thus cannot transfer to the L3.