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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 13:6 (2023) ► pp.743–766

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Phonological parsing via an integrated I-language

The emergence of property-by-property transfer effects in L3 phonology

ORCiD logo with link | University of Victoria
Published online: 3 February 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21017.arc
Abstract
Schwartz, B., & Sprouse, R. (2021). The full transfer/full access model and L3 cognitive states. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11(1), 1–29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar argue against property-by-property Transfer (Westergaard, M. (2021a). Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition. Second Language Research, 37(3), 397–407. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2021b). L3 acquisition and crosslinguistic influence as co-activation: Response to commentaries on the keynote ‘Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition.’ Second Language Research, 37(3), 501–518. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and for wholesale transfer (Rothman, J. (2015). Linguistic and cognitive motivations for the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) of third language (L3) transfer: Timing of acquisition and proficiency considered. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(2), 179–190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) into a third language grammar by questioning the cognitive plausibility of “extracting a proper subpart from the … grammar and using that proper sub-system as the basis for a new cognitive state.” I will argue that the insights from the approaches of López, L. (2020). Bilingual grammar: Toward an integrated model. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Lightfoot, D. (2020). Born to parse: How children select their languages. MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Dresher, B. E. (2018). Contrastive hierarchy theory and the nature of features. In W. Bennett, L. Hracs, & D. Storoshenko, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 18–29). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, and Westergaard, M. (2021a). Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition. Second Language Research, 37(3), 397–407. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar when applied to empirical data from L3 English data from L1 Arabic/L2 French speakers, give us reason to question Schwartz and Sprouse’s defence of wholesale transfer, and its typological underpinnings. We can set the study of L3A in a larger context which can unify domains such as the acquisition of phonology and syntax via a unified approach to parsing. By invoking an underspecified, minimal UG, primary linguistic data, and domain-general third factors which act in concert to parse the E-language to select structures, we can capture the underlying similarity of first, second, and third language acquisition. Parsing proceeds in an error-driven fashion, structure by structure, drawing on the Integrated I-language and UG options found in a Repository. In essence, this approach renders the wholesale/property-by-property distinction a false dichotomy.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Problems with the mechanism of Typological Proximity
  • 3.Empirical evidence: A case study
    • 3.1Loanwords
    • 3.2Phonological comparison
    • 3.3A contrastive hierarchy
    • 3.4Vowels
    • 3.5Consonants
  • 4.An alternative approach: L3 learnability
    • 4.1Phonological knowledge
    • 4.2Similarity
    • 4.3Transfer vs cross-linguistic influence (CLI)
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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