Silia Dutson and Dr. Wendy Baker, Linguistics and English Language Department
As an international student it’s easy to see the importance of language learning and how it can be a means to create and take advantage of opportunities. The learning of a second language is so important that there is an extensive field of research dedicated to improving the learning methods of a second language. Research has allowed the development of resources and a better understanding of how languages are learned.
The topic of bilingualism has become very common in linguistic studies. However, research in third language is fairly recent and there are still a lot of things to learn about the influence of a third language. As the number of multilinguals increase the need to understand the learning of multiple languages increases as well.
The difficult part about investigating a third language is that there are more factors involved than with just two languages. One of the questions that have been asked is how much is the third language influenced by the first and second language. Studies have also been done to find out which one plays a bigger role in interference with the third language. The research on bilingualism has been of great interest for most linguists however the study of the interaction of more than two linguistic systems is also important.
Research in the area of Cross-linguistic influence in Third Language Acquisition is fairly new compared to the same area in second language acquisition. According to Jasone Cenoz, Britta Hufeisen and Ulrike Jessner second language learners have two systems that can potentially influence each other. “Two other bi-directional relationships can take place in third language acquisition: the L3 can influence the L1 and be influenced by the L1 and cross-linguistic influence can also take place between the L2 and L3 (2001).”
Recent research has demonstrated that both the first (L1) and second (L2) language influence the storage, retrieval, and learning of a third language (L3), although which language has the most influence may differ dramatically across languages and situations. The research question in this study was how L1 and L2 priming affect the retrieval of L3 in both the semantic and phonological level.
Three groups participated in this research: native English speakers with Spanish as L2 and French as L3 and native Spanish speakers with English as L2 and French as L3. Subjects had in average a high level of proficiency in their second language and an intermediate level of proficiency in their third language. The third group was simultaneous bilinguals who learned both English and Spanish growing up.
The subjects were asked to perform an L3 (French) lexical decision task which is primed by semantically or phonologically related words either in the L1 or L2 (i.e., either English or Spanish). A lexical decision task involves the participants deciding if a group of letter is indeed a word in a specific language or if it is a non-word.
The semantic priming stimuli are words that are semantically related (i.e., English and Spanish translations of the French target words). Cognate words are not used in order to avoid orthographic priming. I also had words with unrelated semantic primes so that I could compare the Response Times.
The phonological priming stimuli are non-cognate phonologically related primes across the L3 and the L2 or L1. These primes are words which had similar pronunciation (first three sounds), also called cross-language homophones. In this case I intended to use audio clips but the masking was difficult to create so I just used written stimuli. This could have been the reason why I didn’t find significant differences.
Even though the first language seems to exert a stronger influence in the retrieval of the third language the difference wasn’t significant. Also, this influence changes depending on the language level studied. For example, there is a bigger influence in the third language in the phonological level than in the semantic level. However, again these results were not significant once the statistics were used.
There were some problems to this study which could have influence what I intended to find, which was to find a difference between the priming with their first language and their third. I found some differences but they were not significant. One of the reasons could have been because I didn’t have enough participants. It is not easy to find participant with the exact qualifications I needed. There were several Spanish speakers whose second language was English (BYU students) and were also interested in learning French. However, it was difficult to find English-native speakers who had learned Spanish as their second language and were also trying to learn French.
Another problem that could have influenced the results is that I used participants that had participated in a similar study previously and this might have had an effect in their answers.
I had planned on presenting my research on The42nd Annual TESOL Convention & Exhibit but my paper wasn’t accepted. This is a very big conference and they receive many applications. I also planned to send it for the LASSO Conference journal but didn’t since I didn’t get the expected results.
This research was a good experience for me because even though I didn’t get the expected results I learned a lot about how to conduct research and how we get more knowledge from trial and error. I realize because I have been in several language learning settings how important it is to have a better understanding on how language in learned.