A look at relative clauses: Examining the role of L2 syntactic development in L3 acquisition

Kulundary, Valeria; Gabriele, Alison

doi:10.1075/sibil.46.13kul

In:Third Language Acquisition in Adulthood
Edited by Jennifer Cabrelli, Suzanne Flynn and Jason Rothman
[Studies in Bilingualism 46] 2012
► pp. 195–222

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

Examining the role of L2 syntactic development in L3 acquisition

A look at relative clauses

Valeria Kulundary | Tuvan State University

Alison Gabriele | University of Kansas

Published online: 19 December 2012

https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.46.13kul

We examine the role of L2 syntactic development in L3 acquisition. Participants included 132 L3 learners of English (L2 Russian/L1 Tuvan) and 20 L2 learners of English (L1 Russian). The study focused on the comprehension of coordinate clauses and relative clauses, structures which are similar in Russian and English; L3 learners were tested in both languages. Results for the L3 learners showed that better performance in L2 Russian led to better performance on L3 English coordinate clauses. However, performance on L3 English relative clauses was better predicted by level of English proficiency than L2 Russian syntactic development. We propose that morphosyntactic differences between the L2/L3 can hinder the potential for facilitation between languages despite similarities at the level of syntax.

Cited by (12)

Cited by 12 other publications

Order by:

Ramos Feijoo, Jon & María del Pilar García Mayo

2023. The acquisition of relative clauses by Spanish-Basque learners of L3 English: does dominance play a role?. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 61:3 ► pp. 1051 ff.

Sadeghi, Karim

2022. Morphosyntactic Processing in SLA: An Interview with Alison Gabriele. In Talking About Second Language Acquisition, ► pp. 105 ff.

Gabriele, Alison

2021. Microvariation and transfer in L2 and L3 acquisition. Second Language Research 37:3 ► pp. 453 ff.

Marciszewska, Agnieszka A

2021. L3 morphosyntactic processing among Polish–English bilinguals: Considering learners’ level of bilingualism and language dominance. Open Linguistics 7:1 ► pp. 353 ff.

Westergaard, Marit

2021. 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 ► pp. 501 ff.

Puig-Mayenco, Eloi, Jorge González Alonso & Jason Rothman

2020. A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition. Second Language Research 36:1 ► pp. 31 ff.

Rothman, Jason, Jorge González Alonso & Eloi Puig-Mayenco

2019. Third Language Acquisition and Linguistic Transfer,

Benmamoun, Elabbas & Abdulkafi Albirini

2018. IS LEARNING A STANDARD VARIETY SIMILAR TO LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE?. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 40:1 ► pp. 31 ff.

Puig-Mayenco, Eloi & Heather Marsden

2018. Polarity-item anything in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish?. Second Language Research 34:4 ► pp. 487 ff.

ROTHMAN, JASON

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 ► pp. 179 ff.

Rothman, Jason, José Alemán Bañón & Jorge González Alonso

2015. Neurolinguistic measures of typological effects in multilingual transfer: introducing an ERP methodology. Frontiers in Psychology 6

Albirini, Abdulkafi

2014. The Role of the Colloquial Varieties in the Acquisition of the Standard Variety: The Case of Arabic Heritage Speakers. Foreign Language Annals 47:3 ► pp. 447 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.