Document Type
Article
Abstract
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.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Applied Psycholinguistics, Volume 46, 2025, pages e11-.
APA Citation
Tasseva-Kurktchieva, M., & Fahey, D. (2025). Feature typology and L2 proficiency matter: L3 acquisition of Portuguese. Applied Psycholinguistics, 46, e11. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716425000086
Rights
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/), which permits re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited.