Cross-linguistic influence in non-native languages: explaining lexical transfer using language production models

Abstract

The focus of this research is on the nature of lexical cross-linguistic influence (CLI) between non-native languages. Using oral interviews with 157 L1 Italian high-school students studying English and German as non-native languages, the project investigated which kinds of lexis appear to be more susceptible to transfer from German to English and discusses this is in the light of multilingual language production models. The results suggest that CLI is more likely to occur with content words and cognates. It also offers a suggestion that such non-native lexical CLI may be due to non-native languages being tagged as ‘foreign’ rather than as individual languages.

Keywords:

• multilingualism
• non-native lexical transfer
• cross-linguistic influence
• language processing models

Acknowledgements

The data reported in this study was originally collected for my MA Applied Linguistics dissertation at the University of Birmingham, and I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor Dr Jeannette Littlemore. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on the original version of this paper. Any remaining errors are my own.

Notes

1. Note that the word Englisch in German is pronounced with an initial /e/.

2. In the recorded occurrence, the use of the word did not correspond to the English word by.