Cross-linguistic Influence in L3 Acquisition of English by child heritage speakers of Russian in Norway

Abstract

The present study investigates crosslinguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of L3 English by Russian-Norwegian children in attempt to understand how previous knowledge of two typologically distant languages affects the acquisition of the language that shows structural similarities with both languages and what role language dominance plays in this process.

The participants were tested through an acceptability judgment task in conditions targeting the acquisition of articles, subject-verb agreement and word-order. The performance of Norwegian-Russian bilingual children (n = 19) was compared to two control groups – L1 Norwegian (n = 20) and L1 Russian (n = 106) learners of English.

The results of the current study show that the performance of the bilingual speakers differs from their monolingual peers implying that CLI comes from both previously learned languages. Moreover, in one of the conditions (Articles), the bilinguals perform in-between the two groups which indicates that both facilitative and non-facilitative influence takes place in L3/Ln acquisition. Although this study reported evidence of CLI in different linguistic properties, we observed varying developmental trajectories in the tested conditions which implies that accuracy of the participants’ judgements was affected not only by their previous linguistic knowledge but also by the complexity of a particular linguistic property.

The study sheds light on the role of heritage language (HL) use in third language acquisition. Our prediction that CLI from the HL would occur proportionately to the use of the HL, was partially borne out as we found a relatively week but positive effect of heritage language use on the bilinguals’ accuracy in the condition testing subject-verb agreement with plural subjects. This finding suggests that even a non-dominant language can have an impact on the acquisition of the L3.

Overall, the findings of the current study are best captured by the Linguistic Proximity model (Westergaard et al., 2017) and Scalpel Model (Slabakova, 2017) which allow for simultaneous influence of both early-acquired languages and predict both facilitative and non-facilitative influence in L3 acquisition. While the results of this study indicate that linguistic similarity plays an important role in L3A, it is not the only predictor of CLI as both intra-linguistic factors (salience and linguistic complexity) and extra-linguistic factors (dominance and language use) affect the acquisition of a new language.