Feature typology and L2 proficiency matter: L3 acquisition of Portuguese

• Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva ^[1] ; Danielle Fahey ^[2]
  1. [1] University of South Carolina

     University of South Carolina

     Estados Unidos

     
  2. [2] University of Montana

     University of Montana

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Applied psycholinguistics, ISSN 0142-7164, Vol. 46, Nº 1, 2025
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1017/S0142716425000086
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • To determine the source of transfer in third language acquisition (L3A), we tested the effects of grammatical feature typology and L2 Spanish proficiency on the comprehension and production of grammatical [gender] and [number] in the early stages of L3A of Portuguese. We distinguish between the two features based on their participation in the lexical-conceptual structure of the lemma and its interaction with the morpho-syntactic derivation. L1 English speakers were tested on their knowledge of the features in both their L2 and their L3 through a grammaticality judgment task and an elicited production task. Results show that L3 learners transfer only some features, specifically [gender] rather than [number], suggesting a fine-grained divide in feature compositionality between the structural ([gender]) and semantic ([number]) features. We also found facilitative transfer only after a threshold acquisition in L2, in support of the Threshold Hypothesis. For beneficial transfer of a feature, mere knowledge of the L2 structure was found to be sufficient. However, a higher generalized L2 proficiency threshold was found to predict high L3 accuracy.

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