Language Typology, Genealogy And Distance Play A Part In How Languages Are Learned

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Ytsma refers to Bild and Swain's study of 1989, where Italian-speaking participants in a French immersion programme in Ontario, Canada, time and again outperformed participants speaking a language more faintly related to French, when tested for language proficiency.

Jessner refers to Cumming's unpublished doctoral dissertation on writing in L2 (1988), where trilingual adults, i.e. German/Italian bilinguals learning English at university, were asked to think aloud during some academic writing processes.

The examples given in that research show how the respondents search for and assess improved phrasing and compare cross-linguistic equivalents. All three languages are typologically closely related and were used interchangeably by the respondents.

Research by Swain et al. cited in Sanz, continued ...
... to show that language genealogy is a key variable in L3 research. Swain et al., in a study of the impact of LI literacy on L3 (French) proficiency, hypothesised and confirmed that bilinguals who are LI belonged to the Romance family, like French, would benefit the most from their bilingual experience and gain the most positive influence in the acquisition of their L3.

These authors have also shown, according to Cenoz and Genesee, that bilingual students who were literate in their first and second languages showed advantages in third language acquisition over bilingual students who were only literate in their L2.

Odlin reiterates the point by stating that'... learners whose native language is English will find virtually all non-indo-European languages to be much harder than Germanic and Romance languages such as Swedish or French'.

Odlin maintains that cognate vocabulary offers advantages to learners by increasing positive transfer between languages and therefore increasing ease of comprehension in the target language.

Sigokukira makes a further point that needs to be taken into consideration. He says that although L2-L3 similarity is widely argued for in the literature as the cause for L2-L3 influence, it is of course not the only cause. The influence seems to be an interplay of a number of factors, including those such as recency, as argued for in Bentahila and Rivers, referred to by the same author.

Recency simply refers to establishing which language was learned last or more recently. Furthermore, it may not be simply the native language, which assists the learner in learning a second or a third language. It may be that L2 influences L3, or L3 influences further learning of L2.

Singh and Carroll, referred to by Sikogukira, postulate a socio-cultural reason by suggesting that L3 learners may identify more strongly with an L2 than with their LI, which could result in L2 influencing their learning of an additional foreign language'. Indeed, Corder in Sikogukira makes reference to the general observation that 'the more languages one knows, the easier the acquisition of yet another appears to be'. Language typology, genealogy and distance play a part in how languages are learned.

Cross-linguistic transfer may be of assistance to children when learning a new language and it seems to be that more balanced bilingual children will have an advantage over less balanced bilinguals in this regard.

The area of cross-linguistic influence is of relevance to this study in terms of the question around the associations children make between LI, L2 and L3, depending on which language is being learned.

It may be, for example, that children who are being educated in an immersion programme, and have therefore been exposed to a higher level of Irish than those not being educated in an immersion programme, have developed the ability to make more associations between Spanish and Irish, for example, than Spanish and English. The findings in this regard will be presented at a later stage.