Segmental and Prosodic Evidence for Property-by-Property Transfer in L3 English in Northern Africa

Abstract

In this paper, I argue in favour of property-by-property transfer in the third language acquisition of English by L1 Arabic and L2 French speakers in Northern Africa (Algeria and Tunisia) based on a reanalysis of previous work. I provide a phonological analysis of their spontaneous production data in the domains of consonants, vowels, stress, and rhythm. The L3 phonology shows evidence of influence from both L1 Arabic and L2 French, with mixed influences found both within and across segmental and prosodic domains. The vowels are French-influenced, while the consonants are Arabic-influenced; the stress is a mixture of Arabic and French influence while the rhythm is French. I argue that these data are explained if we adopt a Contrastive Hierarchy Model of feature structure with the addition of parsing theories such as those proposed by Lightfoot. These data provide further evidence in support of the Westergaard’s Linguistic Proximity Model. I conclude by showing how this approach can allow us to formalize a measure of linguistic I-proximity and thus explain when the L1 or L2 structures will transfer.