So let’s talk about choices.
Sometimes, you find yourself trapped between two worlds, and there’s no way forward but
to choose one or the other.
Let’s say you’re approaching learning a new language once you’ve already got a couple under your belt.
You have to start somewhere, but which road do you take?
We’re going to investigate today.
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
As we’ve talked about before, when you start acquiring a new language as an adult, you
don’t start from zero, or even from where you started off as a baby.
Instead, your new language journey begins from right where your old language left off.
The first thing you do is transfer over the whole grammar – the sounds, structures,
and semantics – as the base of your new language.
And then you tweak the settings to better match your new target.
You have an underlying outfit, and then make changes so you match your new linguistic surroundings better.
But everything gets more complex once you have more than one language in your head when
you start with the new one.
Because, what should you transfer?
Or do you still just move over the settings from your first language, your L1?
Do you opt for your second language grammar, your L2?
Or can you pick and choose between them, making the best use you can of both grammars to launch
your new one?
There’s no obvious reason to prefer one option over the others as the foundation for
your third language, or L3, so this is a topic ripe for experimentation.
So let’s get right into those experiments.
A 2009 study looked at how native Chinese speakers with advanced L2 English deal with
objects in Norwegian.
Chinese allows you to drop your objects if a sentence is already clear about what you mean.
So you can say 黎琴昨天给她修复了运气, which means “Li Qin fixed her luck yesterday,”
or if it’s already clear you’re talking about luck, you can opt for 黎琴昨天修复了,
which is just “Li Qin fixed yesterday.”
No need to spell out that you mean luck there.
In English, though, that sentence is bad: you need an object pronoun there, it’s got
to be something like, “Li Qin fixed it yesterday”, or it’s no good.
And Norwegian is the same as English on this front: it needs its objects to be said out
loud to be grammatical.
So what transfers?
If the learners in the study shift over their L1 Chinese settings, that wouldn’t be great
for their Norwegian – they need those object pronouns to reliably show up.
It’d be much better for them if they could use their L2 English settings, where objects are required.
They already have them, after all, so why not use them?
And yet… it looks like the Chinese is actually what transfers here.
Their beginner’s Norwegian has way too much acceptance of absent objects, just like Chinese.
It’s only later that they get better at recognizing that Norwegian actually requires objects.
The fact that they’ve got English to draw on doesn’t seem to help.
So is that the rule?
I mean, it could make sense that the first language you learn is the one you start from
when you’re picking up a new one, regardless of how many languages you end up learning.
The thing is, it looks like maybe there is transfer from the L2 sometimes, too.
So a 2009 study looked at how learners with different language backgrounds
dealt with something called aspect.
Aspect is a huge topic in its own right, and we’ll come back to do an episode about it
in the future.
For now, here’s what you need to know: aspect tells you about whether the process a verb
describes was finished or not.
Take something like Toby drinking a cup of coffee.
Aspect is the difference between “Toby drank the coffee”, where the process of drinking
is over, and “Toby was drinking the coffee”, where maybe she’s finished now, or maybe she's not.
The sentence doesn’t actually say.
So this is an important distinction to keep track of - does the verb actually finish verbing, or not?
Some languages, including Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, and French, track this
grammatically: in each, there’s a version of the past tense that marks the verb process
as either being finished or not.
And then there’s English, which is messier than a cranky old sea witch’s house.
English does care about aspect, but it has a mixture of ways of doing it, with a lot
more ambiguity, uses of extra words like "would" and "used to", and different strategies depending
on what kind of verb you’re throwing out there.
It’s not hard for proficient English speakers to use the right ones at the right times,
but it doesn’t map easily onto the Romance aspect system at all.
With that in mind, let’s get back to the acquisition question.
We might assume that, given what we know about transferring your grammar over, picking up aspect in 1
Romance language should be pretty straightforward if you have another similar Romance system already.
But having English also stuffed in your brain could throw a wrench in your transfer plans.
And if English is your first language, can you keep the Romance going from your second
language, or do you have to relearn it from scratch for your third?
And finally, if your L1 is a Romance language, will knowing English get in the way of nailing
L3 aspect, even if it’s not your native tongue?
So the study we’re talking about tested native English speakers who only have one
Romance L2, as well as both of those combinations: native English speakers with a Romance L3,
and Romance speakers with L2 English, learning another Romance language as their L3.
And it turns out, no matter what the ordering, having some Romance in your life already makes
your ability to learn aspect in the L3 smoother and more consistent.
Both L3 groups were more accurate with aspect than the group which only had English.
And that suggests you can transfer stuff over from whichever language you have that’s
most similar to your L3.
It just makes your life easier.
And that’s not the only study that looks like that. A 2011 study looked at how people who spoke
both Spanish and English dealt with Brazilian Portuguese clitics.
Clitics are these weak little pronouns that can’t stand on their own – they need to
be attached to a host verb.
English only has rugged pronouns that don’t need verbal support, but Brazilian Portuguese
and Spanish both use clitics, with a few differences.
For example, both put the clitic before the verb when the verb is finite, like in both
of these, which mean “He looked at me and did not say anything”.
But when the verb is in the infinitive, Portuguese puts the clitic pronoun before the verb, whereas
Spanish puts it after, as with these examples meaning “to welcome us”.
And there are a bunch of other differences, as well – for whether you can use both a
clitic and a noun to point to the same person, what prepositions you need to use, where you
can get away without a clitic, and so on.
So again, we have two Portuguese learning cases to consider: L1 Spanish speakers who
know English, and L1 English speakers who know Spanish.
Are there differences in how people deal with clitics if they started off with a language
that has them, compared to having learned a clitic-using L2 later in life?
Again, what it looks like is that Spanish and English speakers behave similarly: each
group mostly gets the right patterns of usage in Portuguese.
And beyond that, the mistakes that they did make look as if they came from knowledge of
Spanish that didn’t mesh with Portuguese, regardless of whether Spanish was the L1 or
the L2 for the speaker.
So the structural similarities between Portuguese and Spanish led to the Spanish getting transferred,
leaving English out.
So where does that leave us?
Well, a lot of the data on L3 acquisition look like we can draw on whatever
we have that’s closer typologically to what we’re learning.
But that doesn’t seem to be all there is to it.
Sometimes, it seems like even if we have better choices available, the L1 influence just stays stronger.
And there are still a lot of open questions: like, what does closer typologically actually mean?
And, how small are the pieces that you can move from each language?
Like, say, do you transfer the phonology from one, but the syntax from another?
And part of this is just methodologically hard – finding people with the right backgrounds
can be really challenging.
But it’s also that L3 acquisition is a relatively new field, and it’s just starting to get
a lot of attention now.
It’s an exciting area – maybe you can break some ground here!
Whoever investigates this, though, it won’t be much longer before we know a lot more
about what choices polyglot brains make.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week.
If you fixed your luck just right, you learned that linguistic transfer can happen from the
first or the second language into the third; that the parts that transfer may be driven
by typological similarities between the languages you have and the language you’re learning;
and that we have a long way to go before we really know how this kind of transfer works.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman.
It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost, and it’s written by both of us.
Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant is Stephan Hurtubise, our music
is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
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website, where we'll have some extra material on this topic.
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And we’ll see you in two weeks. Saw bolıñız!