Crosslinguistic influence in instructed L3 child phonological acquisition

Abstract

The study of third language acquisition provides an unparalleled opportunity to gain greater insights into the role that previous linguistic knowledge plays in the acquisition process of subsequently acquired linguistic systems. While the past decade of enquiry in this area has seen much progress in regard to our understanding of how lexical and morpho-syntactic systems interact in the multilingual mind, empirical research into third language (L3) phonology has been much slower to appear, and what exists is oriented towards investigations of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) in adult L3 phonological acquisition. The present study aims to add to the emerging field of L3 phonology by reporting the results of an ongoing research project investigating, inter alia, possible sources of and conditioning factors for CLI in L3 segmental acquisition of instructed child learners. The child participants were 20 native speakers of German starting their 1st year of Spanish after 3 years’ instruction in English. The analyses of the child L3 learners’ productions of rhotic sounds in all their languages offer evidence of a range of CLI phenomena, with one of the more prominent factors at play being the intrinsic difficulty of the target phonetic feature.