From L2 to L3, verbs getting into place: A study on interlanguage transfer and L2 syntactic proficiency

One of the least understood (and also least investigated) factors conditioning interlanguage transfer from a prior non-native language (L2) to a subsequent non-native language (L3) is proficiency in the source language of influence. The present study examined whether L2 German syntactic proficiency, defined here as level of development in a cluster of structural properties related to verb placement, had any effect on the occurrence of interlanguage transfer in the L3 English. More specifically, the research question guiding the study asked whether mastery of these properties (discontinuous verb placement, verb final and inversion) constrained the timing, extent and type of such transfer. The corpus analyzed comprised L2 and L3 data from Spanish\slash Catalan bilingual learners (n = 238) aged 9--13. A series of ANCOVAs were run on the data, keeping constant various measures of L2 syntactic proficiency and controlling for L3 overall proficiency and biological age as covariates. The results of these tests yielded a significant effect for verb final (p = 0.046) and subject-verb inversion (p = 0.002). Furthermore, an inverse relationship was found between L2 syntactic proficiency and interlanguage transfer, in that low L2 proficiency in the use of verb final and (especially) inversion was associated with an overgeneralization of discontinuous verb placement in embedded clauses in the L3.