Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2023

This article provides updated perspectives on research related to conceptual transfer, which is defined as crosslinguistic influence arising from language-specific concepts and patterns of conceptualization. I discuss the historical roots of conceptual transfer, its relationship to linguistic relativity and thinking for speaking, its core assumptions, and its current scope of inquiry. While discussing its scope of inquiry, I review some of the key findings in this area of research as well as some of the recent studies that have expanded its scope. I conclude with a summary of five important points that can be drawn from the existing research on conceptual transfer, and I offer suggestions for future directions.

The study examines how three undergraduate beginner students of Italian as L3 make sense of Italian tense-aspect morphology based on other languages. All students had knowledge of Swedish, English, and French, in each case acquired in a particular chronological order. The participants completed two C-tests and three interpretation tests of aspectual contrasts in English, French, and Italian. The latter was complemented by written comments. The results of the Italian interpretation test varied depending on tense-aspect configurations. A qualitative analysis of the comments revealed four categories of metalinguistic reflections, referring to: (i) explicit rules, (ii) intuition, (iii) other languages, and (iv) uncertain/unknown, differently distributed among the students. The results suggest that the students relied on their L1(s) as well as their L2(s) depending on type of transfer, whether linguistic or conceptual, which is discussed in light of some recent L3 models.

The present article addresses the extent to which learners’ mental representations, in particular the phonological and lexical representations of learners’ background languages, influence their ability to perceive and extract linguistic units from a novel speech stream. In the study, native speakers of French were exposed to an unfamiliar language, either Polish or Modern Standard Arabic. A word recognition test taken at first exposure revealed important differences in how French speakers/listeners extract words from the Polish or Arabic speech stream, suggesting that source language representations work differently depending on the specificities of the target language. In addition to providing insights into the effects of source and target language properties on speech perception, these results contribute to on-going discussions about what constitutes crosslinguistic influence and conceptual transfer in second language acquisition research.

In a previous series of crosslinguistic empirical studies in the domain of narratives and picture descriptions, it has been shown that different conceptual principles of discourse structure are built by L1 users based on routine cognitive processes. These in turn seem to be induced by the underlying language-specific properties of the L1s. Native speakers of Dutch and German, for example, tend to conceptualize and structure the progression of the narrative or description through linking devices in utterance-initial position, primarily through the use of the protagonist or temporal/locative adverbials. In contrast, native English speakers tend to prefer linking with the (syntactic) subject in initial position. The present study shows how complex it is for very advanced Dutch learners of L2 English to unravel these non-superficial underlying conceptual discourse structures in their L2. The question is whether they can overcome the routinized cognitive schemata of language processing that go with their habitual L1 strategies of telling a story or describing a picture. This paper shows how even very advanced Dutch learners can only partially learn the narrative or descriptive strategies of native English speakers.

Orthographic depth has been shown to influence the default orthographic processing mechanisms. However, the question of the impact of L1 orthographic depth on the processing of L2 orthography is still open. Crucially, current studies on orthographic depth tend to focus on the processing of simple words and do not consider other factors that interact with orthographic depth, such as morphological complexity. Our study is a preliminary investigation of whether the processing of L2 written inflected words shows crosslinguistic cognitive transfer effects of L1 orthographic depth and L1 morphological complexity. We focus on homophonic vs. heterophonic French subject-verb agreement (arrive / arrivent [aʁiv] (‘arrives’ (3sg) / ‘arrive’ (3pl)) vs. part [paʁ] / partent [paʁt] (‘leaves’ (3sg) / ‘leave’ (3pl)) in two groups of experienced L2 French learners whose L1 is Spanish or Italian (both exhibiting shallow orthography and complex morphology) vs. English (exhibiting deep orthography and simple morphology). Results suggest that during the processing of L2 written inflected words, L2 learners whose L1 is morphologically complex with shallow orthography rely more on orthography-oriented morphological (sub-lexical) processing; whilst L2 learners whose L1 is morphologically simple with deep orthography rely more on phonology-oriented lexical processing.