Cross-linguistic influence and communicative effectiveness in the oral productions of plurilingual Spanish learners

Abstract

This study focuses on cross-linguistic influence and its effect on communicative effectiveness during the acquisition process of Spanish as L3 in an international and multilingual context. It is based on the analysis of lexical errors in the oral productions of four adult learners of Spanish as L3, who have different L1 but common L2. The results show lexical errors due to the influence of previously acquired languages but do not show differences between types of error in relation to their different LM/L1. The results do reflect, however, differences according to the different proficiency level of the target language (i.e. Spanish). Additionally, it is observed that the errors detected in their interlanguages do not seem to represent a serious problem from the point of view of communicative effectiveness. According to the above, these data would indicate the importance of cross-linguistic influence as a communicative strategy factor.