https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3544-2338
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ABSTRACT
This article reports on an empirical study of L3 Mandarin, aiming to shed light on transfer effects and their interaction with other factors throughout the L3 acquisition trajectory. A fill-in-the-blank task was employed to examine L2 and L3 acquisition of three types of Mandarin sentence-final particle clusters. Participants in the study were Mandarin native speakers, L1 English-L2 Mandarin speakers, L1 English-L2 Cantonese-L3 Mandarin speakers, and L1 Cantonese-L2 English-L3 Mandarin speakers at low and high Mandarin proficiency levels. Our data support arguments in the L3 literature that transfer at the L3 initial stages is from a structurally more similar language. Facilitation takes place when the instantiation of the target property in the L3 is exactly the same as that in the transfer source language. Overall typological similarity might be helpful when transfer is from the L1, but it does not always facilitate the L3 acquisition of individual properties. For later L3 development, construction frequency and mapping paradigms have a great impact on the acquisition outcome. Moreover, a certain kind of non-facilitative transfer from an L1 is found to persist in L3 Mandarin grammars, which qualitatively supports the Cumulative Input Threshold Hypothesis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Some researchers argue that the Cantonese SFP maa3 is similar to ma (Law, Citation1990; Sybesma & Li. 2007). However, we agree with Matthews and Yip (Citation1994) and Tang (Citation2015) that the SFP maa3 is not indigenous in Cantonese. It can only be used in a formal context with no negation meanings.
2 The form of ba (吧) is shared by multiple SFPs: a confirmation question SFP, an imperative SFP and an attitude SFP (cf. Pan, Citation2022). Here we focus on the question SFP only.
3 There are 2,784 occurrences of [le ba] and 11,821 occurrences of [le ma] in the corpus of the Centre for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University.
4 The HSK is an official Mandarin language proficiency test established by the Chinese government.
5 Given the challenges associated with learning Chinese characters and tones, learners with a history of less than one year of Mandarin learning and a low proficiency score are classified as (post-)beginners.
6 Unfinished answers included responses with a single or no SFP, which violated the instructions given (i.e. to use all words).
7 The CEM and ECM groups were labelled as L3 and the EM groups as L2. Both Mandarin-Status and Proficiency were dummy coded, with L2 and Low as the reference level, respectively.
8 L1 was dummy coded, with Cantonese as the reference level. Type was also dummy coded. Type 2 was chosen as the reference level because it shares some commonalities with Types 1 and 3. Both Type 1 and Type 2 are grammatical clusters, with the non-existence of Cantonese equivalent in Type 2 being the only difference.