Transfer effects and syntactic development in early-onset instructed L2 English learners

Abstract

First language (L1) transfer effects have been reported both in adult and child second language (L2) acquisition. Further, cognitive demands of cross-linguistic transfer have been found to modulate suppressibility of L1 effects. However, L2 acquisition research is largely dominated by studies on older learners, or younger learners in acquisition-rich environments. To understand L2 development in early-onset learners in instructed contexts, this study employed grammaticality judgment tasks to examine the influence and suppressibility of L1 syntactic features – specifically Chichewa free-word order and pronominal incorporation – on the development of English as a foreign language in a formal school-based context among learners with the age of onset (AoO) of six. The study sampled 202 Grades 9 and 11 learners across three linguistic backgrounds: Chichewa-speaking learners of English, Norwegian-speaking learners of English and English native speakers. Results from inter-L1-group differences, intra-L1-group similarities and L1-interlanguage congruity revealed transfer effects exclusively for pronominal incorporation, indicating that suppressibility operates in a gradual, feature-specific manner. As an obligatory syntactic operation with high cue density, high resting level and entrenched automatisation in Chichewa, pronominal incorporation persists in L2 English as ‘excess automatisation’. These results advance our understanding of L1 influence and suppressibility in early-onset L2 acquisition under formal instructional conditions.