27.2614, Review: Applied Ling; Lang Acq; Socioling: Jessner, Kresić, De Angelis (2015)

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Subject: 27.2614, Review: Applied Ling; Lang Acq; Socioling: Jessner, Kresić, De Angelis (2015)

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Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2016 13:09:22
From: Valeria Buttini-Bailey [valeria.buttini at unibas.ch]
Subject: Crosslinguistic Influence and Crosslinguistic Interaction in Multilingual Language Learning

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-4690.html

EDITOR: Gessica  De Angelis
EDITOR: Ulrike  Jessner
EDITOR: Marijana  Kresić
TITLE: Crosslinguistic Influence and Crosslinguistic Interaction in Multilingual Language Learning
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Valeria Buttini-Bailey, Universität Basel

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

As the editors state, ''research on crosslinguistic influence (CLI) has
evolved considerably over the past twenty years due to a clear surge of
interest in phenomena arising from languages other than L1'' (p. 1). The aim
of the volume is therefore to offer a selection of ''contributions that
reflect current research trends in the field of CLI and metalinguistic
awareness'' (p. 3).

The volume consists of eleven chapters, and it includes a table of contents,
notes on contributors and an index. Each chapter also offers references.

SUMMARY

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction in which the editors provide a brief
general overview about research on CLI, and go on to describe the purpose of
the volume and the content of the following chapters. 

Chapter 2 presents Megan Devlin, Raffaella Folli and Christina Sevdali’s
longitudinal study focusing on the acquisition of the unaccusative/unergative
distinction in a trilingual child. This dichotomy is encoded in Italian
through auxiliary selection, while in English it is not overtly marked.
Devlin, Folli and Sevdali’s aim is therefore to establish whether the
acquisition of such a distinction in a speaker of English and Italian shows
evidence of crosslinguistic influence. Data were collected from a child aged
between five years, four months and five years, seven months. The child was
exposed to Italian from her mother and Scottish Gaelic from her father.
English was the language of the community and the shared language of the
parents, and it was considered the child’s most dominant language. Based on
the literature (Müller/Hulk 2001, Sorace 2011), the authors expected no signs
of crosslinguistic influence. They also expected a robust and unproblematic
acquisition of verbs classified as core verbs in Sorace’s Auxiliary Selection
Hierarchy (Sorace 2000, 2004), with periphery verbs proving eventually to be
slightly problematic.  

The child’s awareness of the unaccusative/unergative distinction in English
and Italian was tested through grammaticality judgement tasks in both
languages designed in the format of a puppet game. Results showed that the
child had acquired the unaccusative/unergative distinction in both languages.
Nevertheless, neither language had been acquired perfectly and her Italian was
less developed than her English. Surprisingly, there was a strong overlap
between the lexical verbs miscategorised in both English and Italian, thus
suggesting a crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of a lexicon-syntax
interface phenomenon from Italian, the child’s weaker language. Besides, the
problematic verbs fell into several semantic classes (change of state, change
of location, controlled motion, etc.) (Sorace 2004). \To account for these
data, a semantic-driven acquisition model is believed by the authors to be
insufficient, and should be substituted by a model according to which children
have knowledge of the projection of arguments independently of the semantic of
verbs. 

Chapter 3 presents a second longitudinal study by Rebecca Dahm, which
investigates the metacognitive strategies developed through pluralistic
approaches based upon unknown languages (PAUL) at school level in France. Data
were collected from twelve-year old students dominant in French and with an A1
level in English being confronted with Dutch, Finnish and Italian. The
experiment included, for each language, three successive sessions of
metasemantic, metasyntactic and metaphonological activities which took place
on a monthly basis. The paper reports the results of the first session, in
which students had to guess the meaning of three texts, one per language. The
texts had similar structural characteristics, such as the presence of
cognates. The students had to write what they could understand and explain how
they proceeded to decode the texts.  Data were then analysed both with
qualitative and quantitative methods. 

The most readily used strategies proved to be comparison and translation,
while resorting to deduction and inferencing proved to be difficult. In
particular, students mainly resort to comparison with languages that present
the greatest linguistic proximity. This perceived proximity has therefore an
inhibitory effect on the spontaneous implementation of the inferencing and
deduction strategies. When there is no typological proximity, the L1 factor
plays an essential role regarding lexicon. The results do not support an L2
factor hypothesis. The inferencing strategy is the least frequently used, but
the results show a slight increase over the three PAUL sessions, demonstrating
that it is probably the strategy that most requires training and is not easily
transferred from one language to another, contrary to the strategy of
deduction. 

In Chapter 4, Laura Sanchez reports on another longitudinal study on syntax
and language learning. The focus of the study is on syntactic transfer with
special reference to the head initial features from the L1 or head final
features from the L2 to verb placement in the English L3 using a combination
of languages that include Germanic and Romance ones. Data were collected
yearly over a four-year period using an elicitation technique and a
questionnaire. Participants were born and raised in Catalonia and were
Spanish-Catalan bilinguals with prior knowledge of German. They were acquiring
L3 English in a formal context in a situation of ‘minimal input’ (Larson-Hall
2008).

The results confirm the occurrence of transfer of head final values from L2
German to L3 English at the initial stage of L3 acquisition. The
identification of L2 German as the source language of influence supports
therefore the L2 status hypothesis. At the same time, the choice of L2 German
over L1s Spanish and Catalan, which are typologically closer to L3 English as
regards VP headedness, does not support the typological primacy model,
according to which the role of typological proximity and structural similarity
is more determining in the occurrence of transfer (Rothman 2010, 2011). Over
time, the transfer evolves and decreases in the L3 interlanguage. This
indicates the coexistence, in the L3 interlanguage, of grammars from the L2
German and the L3 English. 

Chapter 5, by Jan Vanhove and Raphael Berthele, introduces a new approach to
the analysis of CLI using random forests (Breiman 2001) as the primary
statistical tool. The authors investigated the impact of a selection of
item-related characteristics on the probability with which multilinguals can
guess the meaning of visually presented words in an unknown language with
known cognates. In order to avoid spurious findings, they used two independent
but similar datasets featuring different stimuli and participants, and
analysed them separately but in the same way. The cognate guessing tasks were
also administered in a different way. In both cases participants were native
speakers of a Swiss-German dialect, with knowledge of Standard German, English
and sometimes other languages not belonging to the Germanic group, and they
were confronted with either Danish, Dutch, Frisian or Swedish words. The
impact of four variables on cognate guessing accuracy was gauged, i.e. cognate
frequency, and overall, consonantal and word-initial Levenshtein distance
between each stimulus and its German, English and French counterparts. 

The results indicated that the most important item-related predictor of
cognate guessing accuracy is the overall degree of orthographic discrepancy
between the Lx stimulus in a Germanic language and a known cognate in German
or English. This supports the hypothesis that multilinguals draw not only on
their L1 when guessing the meaning of cognates in a related language but also
on their knowledge of a related foreign language. The corpus frequencies of
the stimuli’s German and English cognates also emerged as a relevant predictor
of cognate guessing accuracy, while consonantal and word-initial Levenshtein
proved to only have a marginal effect when overall Levenshtein distances were
also considered. 

On the other hand, for both the orthographic distances and corpus frequencies,
the variables computed with respect to French did not turn out to be robust
predictors of cognate guessing accuracy. As the authors state, a task more
conducive to French-Lx transfer is therefore needed to detect if and how
German-speaking Swiss participants draw on their knowledge of French when
guessing the meaning of related words in an unknown language. 

Chapter 6 presents Divya Verma Gogoi, James D. Harnsberger and Caroline
Wiltshire’s study on speech perception in multilingual learning. The goal of
the study was to examine the effects of a multilingual benefit on the
acquisition of a target language, Malayalam, by two bilingual groups,
Bengali-English and Spanish-English speakers, and one monolingual group of
American-English speakers. The sixty subjects were presented with novel speech
contrasts, i.e. retroflex sounds lacking in the subjects’ L1/L2 sounds
inventory, over a limited period of training. Bilingual groups were expected
to perform better than the monolingual group in perceiving and identifying the
speech contrasts from the unknown language. In order to investigate this
hypothesis, different tests were employed. The performance was measured by
comparing the results at the pre-test level to those at the post-test level. 

The results for the identification tests showed significant group differences
between bilinguals and monolinguals, while the results for the discrimination
tests showed marginal differences. In the case of the generalization tests, no
significant difference was revealed. Finally, the results for the perceptual
assimilation tests showed a significant difference between bilinguals and
monolinguals. Therefore, the outcomes of this study seem to confirm the
existence of a multilingual benefit. In fact, bilinguals seem to function
differently from monolinguals in abstracting and reorganizing the information
gathered from speech in order to deal with the task of acquiring new
non-native speech contrasts. At the same time, the authors suggest the
necessity of using a larger sampling in order to further investigate the role
played by individual variation. 

In Chapter 7, Anat Stavans reports on a study that examines the role of early
exposure to different writing systems in multilingual children’s literacy,
thus focusing on multilingual children who have not yet been formally
schooled. Data were collected from thirty-seven bilingual pre-schoolers living
in Israel, where three or more languages are used on a daily basis. All the
children were attending the same public kindergarten; seventeen were
Amharic-Hebrew speakers, and twenty were monolingual Hebrew speakers. The
children were first assessed informally and asked to write their name, and to
show where their name appears in the room. Later, after a first session aimed
to acquaint the child with the experimenter, they were individually shown
different cards, both alphabetic and non-alphabetic, and were asked whether
what was on the card was readable or not, to place it in the correct pile (yes
or no) and to explain their answers. 

The findings show no significant difference between the multilinguals and the
monolinguals in their judging alphabetic sequences as readable  or in their
explanations. However, statistically significant differences were found
between the groups’ judgements of sequences as non-readable with/out
explanations. The two groups also differ significantly in their provision of
explanations for non-readable judgements. The type of explanation provided
seems to be propelled by different features of the input. Overall, the
monolingual children explained their non-readable judgements by using
predominantly qualitative and quantitative explanations as compared to the
multilingual children, and they seem to attend more to features of the shape,
size, and form of the notation, and length of the sequence. On the contrary,
multilingual children use more language-anchored explanations, attributing the
non-readability of a sequence to the fact that it is an unknown language. 

As a conclusion, Stavans underlines the fact that non-reading and non-writing
children do not wait for formal instruction to begin hypothesizing about
written systems. The visual landscape, the attention that is directed to the
written language, the literacy practises in informal settings such as families
and kindergartens are critical for the emergence of literacy in both
monolingual and multilingual children, and the variety of input from different
writing systems may represent an advantage for multilinguals in the emergent
stages of literacy development. 

Chapter 8 presents Femke Swarte, Anja Schüppert and Charlotte Gooskens’s study
investigating whether non-native knowledge has a positive effect on receptive
multilingualism. The authors focused on the role of the non-native language
German for L1 Dutch speakers in processing and understanding the unknown
Danish language, and conducted two experiments using written and spoken
stimuli. The participants had different levels of German, and they had to
translate Danish words. One half of the Danish stimulus words  had cognates
only in German, while the other half  had cognates only in Dutch. 

Results from the experiments suggest that knowledge of German helps native
speakers of Dutch to decode both written and spoken Danish stimulus words.
They also support the notion of a foreign language mode. However, the effect
of the foreign language mode disappears when the written or spoken stimulus is
placed in a context in the form of a semantic category to which the stimulus
word belongs. 

In Chapter 9, Karolina Mieszkowska and Agnieszka Otwinowska report on an
empirical study investigating mechanisms used by multilinguals when processing
an unknown language that is similar to the languages they already know. The
authors presented a group of 40 Polish advanced users of English (L2) with a
relatively difficult text in Danish, a language they did not know. The
participants, aged between 21 and 30, were students of English at the
University of Warsaw and had different constellations of L3-Ln and varied
cumulative L3-Ln learning experience. The Danish text had to be orally
translated into English and commented. The participants were then shown an
English version of the text and had to judge their translation. Both
translations and comments were recorded in the form of verbal protocols, and
then analysed.
 
Data give evidence that multilingual language acquisition (MLA) embraces
unique and complex factors that arise from the interactions among the many
languages learnt and the processes of learning them. In comparison to SLA, MLA
seems to be characterized by a more complex interplay of factors connected
with language typology and individual learner differences. The research
confirms that the typological distance plays an important role in CLI.
However, it was not the main factor in choosing the auxiliary language for
comprehension of the text in the unknown Danish language.  In fact, it is
proficiency in L3-Ln language together with cumulative language experience
that matters in enhancing the inferencing strategies. Typological proximity
helps only of proficiency in L3-Ln is high enough. Therefore, the data suggest
that the metalinguistic awareness needed to tackle challenging language tasks
develops alongside the process of gaining proficiency in L3, and it can be
considered both a product of multilingualism and a trigger that stimulates
additional language acquisition. 

Chapter 10 presents Christina Lindqvist’s study focusing on a possible
relation between subjects’ perceptions concerning language relatedness and the
source of CLI in L3 written text production. Data were collected in a Swedish
lower secondary school, from pupils with L1 Swedish, L2 English and L3 French.
The participants were given a sheet of paper with six pictures telling a story
about two children who are off to a picnic, and then were invited to write the
story in French. In order to assess their beliefs about the relationship
between Swedish, English and French, the participants were also asked to fill
out a questionnaire exploring psychotypology (Kellermann 1977, 1978, 1983). 

The results show that the learners seem to transfer more from the language
that they perceive as closer to the L3. In all the questions in the
typological perception questionnaire, the learners opted for English to a
larger extent than Swedish when comparing to French, and English dominates as
a source of transfer, especially as far as lexical CLI is concerned.
Therefore, the psychotypology factor appears to play a role. However, these
results were not statistically significant and should be interpreted as
tendencies. 

Chapter 11, written by the editors, serves as a conclusion. It offers an
outline of the most important findings and the overall theoretical and
methodological contributions presented in the volume with respect to language
interactions, CLI and metalinguistic awareness. The editors also underline how
all the research presented in the volume ''supports the basic insight that, in
contrast to second language acquisition, multiple language learning is
influenced by specific and complex factors and is largely characterized by the
crosslinguistic interactions and influences between the various languages
being learnt'' (p. 257). 

EVALUATION

Overall, the editors have succeeded in collating a very well structured,
coherent and readable volume. They have brought together contributions dealing
with different language combinations, age groups, linguistic levels and
methodologies, adding a new perspective on the area of focus and making this
volume interesting for quite a large public. 

Chapters are well organised and referenced, and follow roughly the same
outline. They generally provide enough theoretical background to make them
understandable even by a public who has little knowledge of CLI. Much
appreciated is also the detailed explanation of how the collection of data and
their analysis were conducted. This may give younger researchers the
possibility of learning about a variety of data collection methods and offers
ideas on how to carry out future research.

This book represents an important contribution to the understanding of CLI and
MLA. It will surely be of great interest to researchers in MLA and language
pedagogy and to advanced students in linguistics. Second language teachers may
also benefit, although the theoretical discussion may be somewhat advanced for
those lacking a solid linguistic background and consequently further reading
may be necessary. 

REFERENCES

Breiman, L. 2001. ‘Random forests’. In Machine Learning, 45. 5-32.

Kellermann, E. 1977. ‘Towards a characterization of the strategy of transfer
in second language learning’. In Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, 2. 58-145.

Kellermann, E. 1978. ‘Giving learners a break: Native language intuitions as a
source of predictions about transferability’. In Working Papers in
Bilingualism, 15. 309-15.

Kellermann, E. 1983. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t’. In S. Gass and L.
Selinker (eds), Language transfer in language learning, Rowley, MA: Newbury
House. 112-34.

Larson-Hall J. 2008. ‘Weighing the benefits of studying a foreign language at
a younger starting age in a minimal input situation’. In Second Language
Research, 24 (1). 35-63.

Müller, N. and Hulk, A. 2001. ‘Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language
acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages’. In Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 4 (1). 1-21. 

Rothman, J. 2010. ‘On the typological economy of syntactic transfer: Word
order and relative clause high/low attachment preference in L3 Brazilian
Portuguese’. In International Review of Applied Linguistics, 48 (2/3). 245-73.

Rothman. J. 2011. ‘L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological
determinacy: The typological primacy model’. In Second Language Research, 27
(1). 107-27.

Sorace, A. 2000. ‘Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs’.
In Language, 76 (4). 859-90.

Sorace, A. 2004. ‘Gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface: evidence from
auxiliary selection and implications for unaccusativity’. In A. Alexiadou, E.
Anagnostopoulou and M. Everaert (eds), The Unaccusativity Puzzle: Explorations
of the Synatx-Lexicon Interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 243-68. 

Sorace, A. 2011. ‘Pinning down the concept of “Interface” in bilingualism’. In
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1 (1). 1-33.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Valeria Buttini-Bailey is currently lecturer and postDoc in Italian
linguistics at the University of Basel. Her research interests lie in the
fields of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition,
text linguistic, and syntax. She also teaches Italian as a second language at
the University of Zurich.





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