Cross-linguistic interaction at the grammatical level in L3 reception and production

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is a presentation of cross-linguistic interaction (CLIN; Herdina and Jessner, A dynamic model of multilingualism. Perspectives of change in psycholinguistics, 2002) at the grammatical level in L3 text comprehension and in the reception and production of L3 structures, in several language combinations. The paper is based on three studies. The first study focuses on L3 reception (as reflected in production, that is, translation into L1), the first part of the second one involves a receptive stage (grammaticality judgements) and a productive one (error correction), while the second part focuses on production (translation into L2 and into L3), and the third one concerns the production of L3 structures. In total, the studies involve five languages: Polish, English, French, German and Portuguese. As the results indicate, CLIN can take different forms and occur in various directions. In fact, transfer in production does not have to result in errors or anomalous structures, but also in the preference of certain structures rather than others. Moreover, in reception, not only are some structures more subject to CLIN, but such problems seem to depend on the subjects’ language combination, especially their L1. However, further research on this issue is needed and it would be advisable to develop a research methodology that would allow better isolation of production and reception, which seem largely interconnected.