Page 44 - Diversity in Action

Marco Magnani, Federica Ricci Garotti, and Katharina Salzmann

(1) T: Was trinkst du gerade? (What are you drinking?)
G: Della Wasser. (Della [some, in Italian] water.)
T: Dein blaues Glas ist schön. (Your blue glass is nice.)
G: Ich nein cannuccia blau (I no cannuccia [straw, in Italian] blue.)

Anyone reading this dialogue – particularly the last line – will notice that
the girl’s sentence follows the word order of her L1, Italian. Not only is the
adjective blau not declined (unlike in the teacher’s German sentence: dein
blauesGlas), butit isalsoplacedafter thenoun, as in Italian (lacannucciablu).
The negation is also structured according to Italian grammar: instead of the
correct German negation nicht (‘not’), the girl uses nein (‘no’) immediately
after the subject, mirroring the Italian structure io non ho la cannuccia blu
(‘I don’t have the blue straw’). Additionally, the verb is omitted entirely. The
mostimmediateconclusionisthatthechildisacquiringtheforeignlanguage
based on the structural principles of her first language. In other words, the
new language appears to be embedded within the framework of her native
Italian.
This is the basis of the contrastive hypothesis on L2 acquisition: from this
perspective, the brain would be linguistically dominated by the first lan-
guage already at an early age (four years old, in the example above), when
children are still processing their L1.
Actually, there are other explanations for this phenomenon – perhaps less
immediate, but more strongly supported by empirical data. The first hypoth-
esis is that language development does not occur ‘by contrast,’ i.e. through
the more or less spontaneous integration of the foreign or second language
into the first language system, but that, on the contrary, the first language
is neither the cause nor the origin of the first expressions in the foreign lan-
guage. Instead, it can be assumed that the child, in this case, is already within
a process of linguistic development that is subject to certain rules. The lexi-
caltransfer,undertheseconditions,ofthewordstraw fromthefirst language,
denotes not only that the child lacks that lexical element in the foreign lan-
guage, but also her intention to express a meaning with the linguistic re-
sources available to her. While this is undoubtedly an instance of transfer, our
focus should shift away from non-target-like structures and instead consider
the child’s intent and effort to express her thoughts in an authentic interac-
tion with the teacher. The real question, then, is: what factors induce transfer?
We know that not all transfers are equal – some are positive, while oth-
ers are negative. We speak of a negative transfer when structures from the
L1 are carried over into L2 due to gaps in L2 knowledge, either consciously

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