Our paper accepted for publication in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

Our paper titled “How syntactic gradience in L1 affects L3 acquisition: A longitudinal study” (Sylwiusz Żychliński, Anna Skałba, Magdalena Wrembel, Kamil Kaźmierski) was accepted for publication in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism! Below we provide a short summary of the paper.

Third language acquisition studies have gained wide relevance in times of rapid globalization and increasing multilingualism. In our study we are exploring the role of previously acquired languages in third language acquisition. Through linguistic questionnaires, we tested L1 Polish L2 English students of L3 Norwegian to assess whether the similarities and differences in selected syntactic aspects between Polish and Norwegian, as well as English and Norwegian, would result in a facilitative effect in the acquisition of Norwegian. Notably, Polish constructions showed gradience (partially parallel distribution of jej/jego ‘her/his’ and swój ‘self’ and less rigid word order), permitting a broader spectrum of acceptability judgments, while in English the contrasts (in the use of definite and indefinite articles) were binary in nature (grammatical or ungrammatical). Our results revealed a facilitative effect of L2 English on the acquisition of L3 Norwegian of our participants, while no such effect was identified for L1 Polish. We believe that this may have been partly due to the presence of gradience in Polish, which added complexity to the acquisition process.