Open AccessCrosslinguistic influence in the production of English as L3
Author(s) -
Pâmela Freitas Pereira Toassi,
Mailce Borges Mota
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
horizontes/revista horizontes de linguística aplicada
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2237-0951
pISSN - 1677-9770
DOI - 10.26512/rhla.v20i1.32893
Subject(s) - german , cognate , linguistics , portuguese , psychology , neuroscience of multilingualism , narrative , first language , language proficiency , production (economics) , language production , cognition , philosophy , neuroscience , economics , macroeconomics
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) refers to the phenomenon of how one language affects the acquisition and processing of another language by the same speaker. Bilinguals and multilinguals offer a good opportunity to study crosslinguistic phenomena since they have multiple language systems in interaction. Here we report the results of a study which investigated CLI in bilinguals and trilinguals. The objective of the study was twofold: (1) to analyze the influence of cognate words in the oral production of L2 and L3 English speakers in terms of quantity and type of cognates (English-Portuguese, English-German, English-German-Portuguese); (2) to investigate CLI in the production of English as L3. Participants were required to narrate a story on the basis of four pictures. The analysis of the narratives showed that bilinguals and trilinguals produced a similar number of cognate words of the type English- Portuguese and English- German- Portuguese. Regarding the cognate type English- German, trilinguals produced a significant higher number of these words as compared to the bilinguals. Since the bilinguals had no knowledge of German, these results indicate that the L2 (German) of the trilinguals facilitated the production of English-German cognates. We interpret these results as evidence of the coactivation of the trilinguals’ languages.