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L2 vs. L3 initial state: A comparative study of the acquisition of French DPs by Vietnamese monolinguals and Cantonese–English bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2005

YAN-KIT INGRID LEUNG
YAN-KIT INGRID LEUNG
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Abstract

This paper compares the initial state of second language acquisition (L2A) and third language acquisition (L3A) from the generative linguistics perspective. We examine the acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) by two groups of beginning French learners: an L2 group (native speakers of Vietnamese who do not speak any English) and an L3 group (native speakers of Cantonese who are also proficient L2 English users). Two current competing models in the field of theoretical second language acquisition, namely Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) and the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) are compared and their extension to L3A evaluated. Results point to full transfer of L1 in the L2 initial state and partial transfer of L2 in the L3 initial state. The L3 group performed significantly better than the L2 group on most of the properties tested. We suggest that these findings are not totally consistent with either FTFA or FFFH, but argue that they crucially demonstrate that L3A is not simply another case of L2A because transfer in L3A does not necessarily always come from L1.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 2005 , pp. 39 - 61
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2005

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Footnotes

The research reported in this article is a revised version of part of the author's Ph.D. dissertation completed at the Department of Linguistics, McGill University, Montréal, Canada (Leung 2002b), which was supported by grants from SSHRCC (to Lydia White & Nigel Duffield) and FCAR (to Lydia White et al.) as well as by a McGill Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Thesis Research Grant to the author. Much earlier versions of different parts of this research were presented at the Second Language Research Forum (University of Wisconsin-Madison, September 2000), the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2001) and the Pacific Second Language Research Forum (University of Hawai'i at Manoa, October 2001) and have appeared in Leung (2001, 2002a). The author wishes to thank Lydia White for her supervision as well as Denis C. Meyer, Marie-Hélène Arnauld and Jeanne Tieu Thi Than Xuan for recruitment and testing of subjects in Hong Kong and in Montréal. Special thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for Bilingualism: Language and Cognition for their very useful comments and suggestions as well as to the editors for their kind assistance in getting the manuscript published. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are the author's.