Event related potentials at initial exposure in third language acquisition: Implications from an artificial mini-grammar study

Syntax Matters: Exploring the Effect of Linguistic Similarity in Third Language Acquisition

“…The behavior of the participants who had learned Language C is incompatible with the idea of wholesale copying of the grammar that was lexically more similar to the L3 input at the initial stages. Thus, our results corroborate the findings of González Alonso et al (2020), who also reported results that were inconsistent with the occurrence of wholesale transfer very early in the process. González Alonso et al argued that their findings reflected so-called pretransfer stages, indicating that wholesale transfer could take place later in the acquisition process.…”

“…Although we have clearly shown that there had been no wholesale transfer at the time of testing, we cannot rule out the possibility that wholesale transfer might take place at a later stage. However, while Gonzalez Alonso et al (2020) argued for the existence of a pretransfer stage based on the lack of an early P600 effect, our results show that learners are sensitive to linguistic properties at the bottom of Rothman's (2013Rothman's ( , 2015 hierarchy at this very early stage.…”

“…Our results did not support the idea of wholesale transfer at the initial state as proposed by , nor did the findings support the idea of wholesale transfer taking place as soon as the parser detects similarity between the L3 and one of the previously acquired languages (at the initial stages) based on the four-way hierarchy of Rothman (2013Rothman ( , 2015-lexicon, phonology, morphology, syntax. However, our findings could not preclude the possibility that wholesale transfer takes place later in the acquisition process as discussed by González Alonso et al (2020). In our view, a more plausible explanation for our results is that learners have access to both previously acquired languages throughout the acquisition process as proposed by property-by-property accounts of L3 acquisition (Flynn et al, 2004;Slabakova, 2017;Westergaard, 2021a).…”

“…Rather, it might simply mean that the process takes place earlier or later. In short, this is what González Alonso et al (2020) argued for in an artificial language learning experiment that tested the impact of lexical similarity between artificial L3s and the learners' preexisting grammars, L1 Spanish and L2 English. The L3s were either lexically like English (mini-English) or like Spanish (mini-Spanish).…”

“…The learners were exposed to and trained on gender agreement-a morphological similarity to Spanish, suggesting that there were incongruent cues in mini-English. The behavioral data collected for response time and grammaticality judgments showed no between-groups differences because both groups were relatively accurate (68-69%) in detecting gender violations in the L3 (González Alonso et al, 2020). González Alonso et al also collected event-related potentials, expecting that wholesale transfer of the lexically more similar language would be reflected in sensitivity to gender violations (a P600 component) by learners of mini-Spanish.…”