A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition

The present systematic review examines what factors determine when, how and to what extent previous linguistic experience (from the L1, L2 or both languages) affects the initial stages and beyond of adult L3 acquisition. In doing so, we address what a bird’s eye view of the data tells us regarding competing theoretical accounts of L3 morphosyntactic transfer. Data couple together to suggest that some factors are more influential than others. As discussed, the systematic review transcends the field of adult multilingualism precisely because of what it reveals, as a prima facie example in behavioral research, in terms of how different types of methodological considerations impact the way data are interpreted to support or not particular claims

Inflectional morphology

Adult L2 learners often exhibit variability in their use of inflectional morphology, even at very high levels of proficiency and across the verbal and nominal domains. In this chapter, we define morphological variability and show that morphology errors are systematic because linguistically constrained. Suppliance of inflectional morphemes in obligatory contexts under-represents learner knowledge of functional categories, and in particular, their semantic and syntactic effects. Nevertheless some properties exhibit considerably more variability than others. Morphological defaults, markedness effects and feature interpretability have been advanced as linguistically-based explanations of morphological variability. A dissociation of underlying morphosyntactic knowledge (competence) and slower, more labored processing, including lexical access difficulty, are proposed to explain differences between native speakers’ and advanced learners’ performance. <br/