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Third Language Acquisition

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Third Language Acquisition See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320394588 Third language acquisition Chapter · January 2018 CITATIONS READS 0 2,836 2 authors: Jennifer Cabrelli Mike Iverson University of Illinois at Chicago Indiana University Bloomington 36 PUBLICATIONS 388 CITATIONS 36 PUBLICATIONS 315 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Third language acquisition View project Second language acquisition View project All content following this page was uploaded by Jennifer Cabrelli on 14 October 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Cabrelli Amaro, J., & Iverson, M. (in press). Third language acquisition. In K. Geeslin (Ed.), Handbook of Spanish Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1 Introduction Language acquisition research has long made distinctions between first and second language acquirers, recognizing the potentially different paths and outcomes and carrying out systematic investigation of these acquisition scenarios. However, only recently—within the past 20 years—has the distinction between second and third language acquirers been treated with the same fervor. Acknowledging that acquiring a second and third language are different processes is a crucial step for both second language (L2) and third language (L3) research. For L2 research, it means abandoning the tacit assumption that all acquisition beyond the native language is comparable and identifying the possible confound of including multilinguals in an L2 study. For L3 research, it has meant the birth of a new subfield. In the following chapter, we give a brief history of L3 research, detail the current state of the field with a focus on the impact of Spanish on the study of L3 acquisition, and provide possible directions for future lines of inquiry. 2 Early studies of third language acquisition To understand the origin of the lines of inquiry that currently drive L3 acquisition, it is necessary to consider a set of studies which arguably constructed the field’s foundation at the end of the twentieth century. The research we report on here ranges from early impressionistic diary studies to large-scale quantitative studies, and dates to Vildomec (1963), which to our knowledge was the first systematic treatment of multilingualism. Larger-scale experimental work began later in the 1960s (e.g., Rabinovitch & Parver [1966] for phonology) and 1970s (e.g., Stedje [1977] for lexical transfer), but as our review will reflect, appearance of these studies was sporadic and an appreciable increase in output began in the 1980s and 1990s. From this body of work, we have pulled out the variables with the most substantial presence, and detail general findings.1 We then segue into a brief discussion of the limitations of this research before moving onto research from the last fifteen years. We note that, while most of the studies mentioned in this section do not involve Spanish, the incorporation of these studies is necessary to establish the early trajectory of this area of investigation. When considering the L3 research that came out of the last decades of the twentieth century, a central theme can be identified, which is that of transfer/cross- linguistic influence (CLI). Herein, we focus on this theme, while acknowledging that this is one of several lines of inquiry in the field of multilingualism. The fundamental questions related to CLI come out of the notion that, unlike second language acquisition, there are two background languages to contend with. So, what CLI patterns are present at 1We recognize that this overview of L3 research in the twentieth century is abbreviated and (necessarily) simplified. For exhaustive reviews of earlier L3 research, we direct the reader to De Angelis (2007) for a general overview, Cabrelli Amaro (2012), Cabrelli Amaro and Wrembel (2016), and Wrembel (2015) for phonology, García-Mayo (2012) for cognitive approaches, and García-Mayo and Rothman (2012) for morphosyntax. different stages in L3 acquisition, and what are the variables that yield these patterns? One primary variable proposed to drive L3 acquisition has been language status. Is the source of transfer more likely to be the L1, the L2, or both, and why? Early research suggested that reliance on the L1 as opposed to the L2 depends on the domain of grammar, with research from this period limited primarily to lexical transfer and, to a lesser degree, phonetic/phonological transfer. Several studies showed that lexical transfer comes primarily from the L2 (e.g., Rivers, 1979; Stedje, 1977; Vogel, 1992), although semantic transfer has been posited to originate with the L1 (Ringbom, 1987). Regarding phonological transfer, Llisterri and Poch-Olivé (1987) and Ringbom (2001) report evidence of L1 transfer (with Ringbom [2001] showing long-term effects of L1 transfer, particularly for intonation), while Bentahila (1975) and Chumbow (1981) report L2 phonological influence in learner speech. How might age of acquisition of a language relate to source of transfer? There was a common assumption that L1 transfer occurs due to the entrenched nature of the system and the cumulative experience that a learner has with the language compared to the L2, referred to as the ‘mother tongue effect’ (Chumbow, 1981). Some researchers proposed that L2 transfer might be driven by a conscious desire to avoid the L1 to sound ‘non-foreign’ (see e.g., Hammarberg, 2001, for a discussion of this phenomenon). Other proposals for a ‘foreign language effect’ (e.g., Meisel, 1983) focused on similarities in L2 and L3 acquisition processes (cf. Stedje [1977] and Ringbom [1987], who claim that L2 transfer is more likely if acquired naturalistically), which results in the blocking of L1 transfer (e.g., Dewaele, 1998). Still others noted that L2 transfer could be the product of recency, whereby the L2 is transferred because it has most recently been activated (Hammarberg, 2001; Vildomec, 1963), or that L2 transfer will be more likely in an L2 context (Stedje, 1977). How can we be certain of an L2 effect and explain contradictory findings such as those reported earlier for L3 phonological transfer? Unfortunately, we cannot isolate the role of language status without considering other potential variables in the research design. For example, Stedje’s (1977) investigation of L1 Finnish/L2 Swedish L3 German learners’ lexical transfer reported L2 transfer, but the learners’ L2 also happens to be more similar than Finnish to German. Therefore, it was not possible to pinpoint whether there was an L2 effect or whether the typological relationship between Swedish and German drove transfer. This confound was present in most early research, which primarily consisted a single learner or group of learners with similar linguistic backgrounds. Several studies reported (perceived) typological similarity as a catalyst for transfer (e.g., Bild & Swain, 1989; Singh & Carroll, 1979; Singleton, 1987) but none of these could rule out the role of other factors in their design. The few exceptions are studies by Ringbom (1987), Cenoz and Valencia (1994), and Llisterri and Poch-Olivé (1987), all of which employed a design using mirror-image groups: they observed two groups of sequential bilinguals that had each acquired the same language pair, but in reverse order; this design made it possible to tease apart language status and similarity. For example, Ringbom (1987) compared two groups of L3 English learners, L1 Finnish/L2 Swedish and L1 Swedish/L2 Finnish, and found that both groups transferred Swedish lexical items independently of whether Swedish was the L1 or L2. These early studies informed methodological issues, and prompted foundational questions of current research, which we review in the following section. 3 Research questions that drive the study of L3A and a review of the literature The research discussed in Section 2 made clear the value of examining third language acquisition not just as another instance of L2 acquisition and established several research questions that have been further refined over the last two decades. Researchers have begun to fill in some of the gaps pointed out by Fouser (1995) in his synthesis of L3 acquisition research, including the lack of investigation of both process and product, production and comprehension, and facilitative and non-facilitative transfer. Within this section, we address the progress that has been made towards what we see as the primary research questions that drive this field: understanding a) what catalyzes initial transfer to the L3 and b) developmental processes and their effects on the L3 as well as the L1/L2. Throughout this discussion, the substantial role of Spanish in the investigation of L3 acquisition will become clear. 3.1 Cross-linguistic influence during the L3 initial stages While L3 acquisition is a distinct area of inquiry, it borrows from insights in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. L2 research shows that a learner’s prior linguistic experience (the L1) can influence L2 development, and that the entire L1 grammar may form the initial state of L2 acquisition (e.g. Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). This is readily acknowledged in L3 research, as is the additional layer of complexity of two potential sources of cross-linguistic influence, the L1 and the L2. The first explicit models of L3 acquisition aimed to predict patterns of linguistic transfer for beginning L3 learners (specifically, morphosyntactic transfer, which was not a focus of the research reported in Section 2). However, they differ in their conception of a) the consistency of transfer—is the source of transfer fixed (always the L1 or L2) or variable (possibly the L1 or L2)?—and b) the selectivity of transfer—is a full grammatical system transferred, or only a partial system?—as well as the underlying catalysts for transfer. One logical possibility in L3 acquisition is that the L1 serves as the L3 initial state and influences behavior in the L3 at the initial stages.
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