Page 53 - Diversity in Action

Transfer in Early Multilingual Acquisition

Reflection Point
1. Think of some lexical similarities between related languages (e.g. Sloveni-
an/Croatian-Russian, German-English, Italian-Ladin) and imagine how you
could transmit those similarities to your learners.
2. How do you react to instances of lexical transfer (code-mixing)? Why is
it important for bi- and plurilingual speakers to be able to draw on their
whole language repertoire?
3. Try to think of a grammatical phenomenon (e.g. cases, word order, articles)
where in second or third language acquisition you could benefit from your
L1.

L1-L2 Distance with Negative Transfer
Apart from negative transfer on the semantic level of single words (so-called
false friends such as Ger. Regal = It. regalo, since Regal means scaffale, i.e.
‘shelf,’ and regalo Geschenk, i.e. ‘present’), interferences often occur at the
phraseological level, i.e. when learners make mistakes in combining words.
Herearesomeexamplesofnegativetransferregardingidiomaticexpressions
and the use of prepositions produced by children growing up bilingually
with German and Italian in South Tyrol, an officially bilingual region:

(7) Ger. ich *habe kalt (< It. ho freddo)instead of mir ist kalt, ‘I’m cold’
(8) It. ti *ho bene (< Ger. ich hab’ dich lieb)instead of ti voglio bene, ‘I love
you’
(9) Ger. das *macht nicht weh (< It. non fa male)instead of das tut nicht weh‚
‘it doesn’t hurt’
(10) It. Il mio compleanno è *all’8 gennaio (< Ger. Mein Geburtstag ist am 8.
Januar)instead of Il mio compleanno è l’8 gennaio‚ ‘Mybirthdayison
the 8th of January’

Moreover, certain instances of transfer are due to polysemy, i.e. the fact
that a word has several meanings in one language, while it has only one
meaning in the other. In this way it is possible to explain the following ut-
terance produced by a four-year-old child growing up with Italian and Ger-
man: while holding a flower to the mother’s nose, the child says hör’! (‘listen’)
instead of riech’ (‘smell’). This anomalous usage of the German verb hören
(‘to hear/listen’) clearly can be traced back to the Italian perceptional verb
sentire, which is polysemous, meaning to hear/listen, to taste, to feel and to
smell. In all these cases the adult should repeat the correct form in the target
language (e.g. Genau, das TUT nicht weh. ‘Exactly, it doesn’t hurt’ or: Ah, ich
soll an der Blume RIECHEN. ‘Ah, I should smell the flower’), possibly stressing

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