Crosslinguistic Influence in Third Language Acquisition: Acquisition of an artificial language by Persian-English bilinguals

Abstract

Aims and objectives: This thesis investigates the role of the previously acquired languages, Persian and English, in the acquisition of morphosyntax of an artificial language (AL) at the very early stages of third language acquisition (L3A). The main objective of the study is to ask how lexical and syntactic similarities between the L3 and previously acquired languages affect crosslinguistic influence (CLI) at the very beginning of L3 acquisition. Methodology: The study compared two groups of Persian-English bilingual L3 learners who were exposed to an artificial language with varying degrees of syntactic similarity to their L1 and L2. However, the study kept the participants’ pre-existing languages constant. They were tested on V3 (grammatical in both languages) vs. Adjective-Noun (Adj-N)/Noun- Adjective (N-Adj) word order which differs between the two languages. Data and analysis: The forced-choice AJT data was analyzed in RStudio, R version 4.1.2 (R Core Team, 2022). The lme4 R package (Bates et al., 2015) was used to fit a mixed-effects binomial logistic regression model to the data. The response variable was the forced choices (N-Adj or Adj-N) and the predictor variables were Group (A: English-Persian syntax and B: Persian syntax), English Proficiency Test (EPT) Scores and Age of onset in learning English (AoO). Participants’ ID and Items were added as the random intercepts. Findings and conclusion: The findings indicate that although there was a discernible pattern in the expected direction (it was anticipated that Group B, who were exposed to the Persian syntax, would choose the N-Adj word order more frequently than Group A.), the impact did not attain statistical significance, possibly due to significant variability of participants. Furthermore, the study revealed a fact about the AoO and critical item scores, in which the later the participants started learning English, the more likely they were to activate their Persian word order and they chose N-Adj (Persian syntax) word order. Significance: This study adds to the existing data on the acquisition of an artificial language and contributes to the ongoing discussions on the role of multilingualism.