Page 49 - Diversity in Action

Transfer in Early Multilingual Acquisition

• transfer from the L1 is only partial, meaning that the initial stage of L2
learning does not coincide with the final L1 stage;
• learners can transfer a structure from their L1 only when they are devel-
opmentally ready to produce it.

Håkansson et al. (2002) have proved this hypothesis by conducting a cross-
sectional study on 20 Swedish L1 learners studying English L2 and focusing
on the acquisition of the verb-second (V2) structure. As anticipated in the
section ‘Which factors lead speakers to transfer?,’ this structure is present in
both Swedish and German. In both languages, the fronting of adverbials for
discourse and pragmatic reasons entails that the subject comes immediately
after the verb, as illustrated in (5).

(5) a. Swedish Idar dricker Peter mjölk
b. German Heute trinkt Peter Milch
Today drinks Peter milk

Given such structural similarity, it may seem reasonable to expect that all
Swedish L1 learners who took part in the study can correctly produce the V2
structure in German L2. However, the findings showed the opposite: only 5
out of 20 learners provided positive evidence of this structure. Among the
remaining 15 students, 6 never initiated their sentences with a time or place
adverbial, and 9 produced the incorrect adjunct-subject-verb order.
Håkansson et al. (2002) argue that the V2 structure is a complex one, which
is expected to emerge at Stage 4 (out of a total of 6 hypothesised stages)
along the developmental sequence predicted by Processability Theory. For
this reason, learners who are still at lower stages cannot produce this struc-
ture in German L2, even though the same structure exists in Swedish L1. In
order to transfer that structure, learners must be developmentally ready to
acquire it.
Along similar lines, Artoni and Magnani (2021) have looked at the acquisi-
tion of case in Russian L2 by adult learners divided into three groups based
on their L1: (a) learners with L1 Italian, a language with no case marking on
nouns; (b) learners from a non-Slavic L1 with a case system that is radically
different from the Russian one (e.g. Azeri and Georgian); (c) learners from a
Slavic L1 with a case system akin to the Russian one (e.g. Serbian, Slovak).
Following Processability Theory’s developmental hierarchy, Artoni and
Magnani (2021) hypothesise that learners will learn the opposition between
nominative and accusative first only based on positional criteria, then also

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