Interference

[reineke]

Buenas diores

Language Transfer

Linguistic sibling rivalry: Mutual interference between Portuguese and Spanish

"Our results indicate that, although more fluent Spanish speakers believed learning Portuguese would be easier than did the less fluent students, their acquisition of Portuguese was not systematically better than those who were less fluent in Spanish. However, those with less fluency in Spanish did show increasing interference from Portuguese in their Spanish as the semester progressed, while those who were very fluent in Spanish did not show interference from Portuguese. The project also allowed us to highlight specific words and patterns that teachers may want to emphasize to the students in the beginning of their study of the Portuguese language to avoid the formation of bad habits."

http://www.ensinoportugues.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Souza_etal_9-26-13-FINAL-NEW.pdf

Advanced language attrition of Spanish in contact with Brazilian Portuguese

"One the one hand, he comprehends both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese without any of the difficulties that might hamper a monolingual Spanish speaker who has less exposure to the other language. While his production is never exclusively Portuguese, he exhibits production of phenomena not permitted in the monolingual Spanish grammar. On the other hand, it’s possible that his attrited Spanish grammar is really the only grammar he has, and it’s used to parse both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Perhaps due to the mutual intelligibility of the two languages, the acquisition and construction of a new grammar has not been necessary, yet he has made local modifications in his Spanish grammar to cope with the increasing amounts of exposure to Brazilian Portuguese."

http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi ... ontext=etd

How language production shapes language form and comprehension

Development and Care of the Utterance Plan

Language planning shares features of both high-level non-linguistic action planning and more fine grained motor control. In high-level action plans, some elements have only loosely constrained sequences.

...production planning has inherent working memory demands, with consequent interference and other pitfalls well known to memory researchers.

Language production is said to be incremental, meaning that partial planning, execution, and subsequent planning are interleaved.

...production behavior is shaped by learned implicit strategies that maximize fluency, as the scope of planning strikes a balance between competing demands. On the one hand, initiating execution before much planning is complete allows producers to begin speaking earlier, avoiding long pauses and retaining the floor in a conversation. Early execution also avoids the memory burden of maintaining and executing a large plan, as more complex plans require more time to initiate execution,..

...speakers learn implicit strategies to mitigate production difficulty, in this case learning to allocate more attention to the upcoming plan as they become more fluent, and learning to favor early execution and incremental planning, with delaying tactics and additional damage control if the plan runs out...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636467/

The Interference of Spanish in Beginning Portuguese Classes

1977

http://www.jstor.org/stable/340399

THE INFLUENCE OF THE MOTHER TONGUE ON SECOND LANGUAGE VOCABULARY ACQUISITION AND USE

language distance, transfer and learning

"Language distance clearly has some effect on the amount of transfer that can take place between languages, and therefore on the extent to which transfer can support or hinder learning. Related languages often share a great deal of cognate vocabulary, and even where vocabulary is not cognate, there tend to be close translation equivalents: this can give learners an enormous advantage. Where languages have less common ground, word forms will generally be quite different; more information about word meaning and use also has to be acquired from scratch. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that Swedish- and Spanish-speaking learners of English acquire vocabulary faster and more successfully than Finnish- and Arabic-speakers (see Odlin 1989: 77–80 for details and discussion). Transfer from third languages seems to depend very much on relative language distance (Ringbom 1987: 113–14, 119). Difference of phonological structure also has an effect on vocabulary learning. It has been shown that, as one might expect, those foreign words which conform more or less to the phonetic and orthographic patterns of the mother tongue are the easiest to assimilate (Laufer 1990, Ellis and Beaton 1993). English has a large inventory of phonemes, permits quite elaborate consonant clusters, and reduces unstressed vowels. These features make many English words hard to handle for speakers of languages, like Spanish or Japanese, which have a different type of phonology.

Cultural distance, as well as language distance, can greatly affect ease or difficulty of learning. A Hungarian learner of Spanish, for example, will find that, though there are virtually no cognates (Spanish and Hungarian are unrelated), the new words in general express familiar concepts and are often semantically congruent with mother-tongue roots; so that a good deal of semantic transfer is possible. This will be far less the case for a Hungarian learning Chinese: not only are the words quite different in the two languages, but there is also far less overlap between the concepts that they express...

Types of error are therefore likely to vary somewhat with language distance. Where the first and second language are closely related, there may be fewer errors resulting from the intrinsic difficulty of what has to be learnt, since the mother tongue will provide support in more areas. At the same time, since more can be transferred, there is more scope for the type of interference errors which arise when items in two languages are similar but not identical in form or use. Conversely, where languages are unrelated, more errors are likely to result from the intrinsic difficulty of second-language items, whereas the role of interference will be somewhat reduced.

Learners' perceptions of linguistic or cultural distance may also affect their readiness to transfer. As we have seen, there is more scope for successful transfer between closely related languages than between languages whch are not related, and most learners seem to develop some sense of where they stand in this respect. Kasper (1992) cites evidence that Danes transfer mother-tongue usages more freely to German than to English.

Readiness to transfer may also be affected by such factors as personality profile, type of education, and personal and cultural attitudes to language...

But on balance the equivalence hypothesis puts us ahead of the game: it enables us to learn new languages without at the same time returning to infancy and learning to categorise the world all over again.

when the equivalence hypothesis fails: errors and avoidance

The equivalence hypothesis can fail simply because the learner misinterprets a word or expression. There is an apocryphal story about a school class who thought that their French teacher's regular greeting 'Bonjour, mes enfants, asseyez-vous' meant 'Good morning, boys, sorry I'm late'.

Even when the learner correctly interprets the reference of a new word, he or she is unlikely to grasp all of its semantic and structural characteristics immediately, and the correspondence with the mother-tongue 'equivalent' is almost certain to break down somewhere. As we have seen, when words in two languages are not exact equivalents, each may have more than one 'translation', depending on the exact meaning or context. Learners often acquire one of the equivalents before the others, and use this 'primary counterpart' (Arabski 1979) in both appropriate and inappropriate cases. Conversely, where the mother tongue makes lexical distinctions that are not matched in another language, learners may undergeneralise. A French learner of English may use door for the door of a room or house (French porte), but not apply it to the door of a car (French portière). Errors arising from the inappropriate use of partial translation equivalents are extremely common...

More serious problems arise when crosslanguage 'equivalents' do not belong to the same part-of-speech category, as is often the case between mutually distant languages. Punjabi learners of English often treat prepositions as nouns, reanalysing English relational terms as names of locations on the pattern of the mother tongue and producing forms such as*Put the down chair (Perdue 1993 vol II: 246). Some other examples of this type of error: *in upstairs, *I live with enjoy, *It's belong to me (author's files).

Interference can be from another foreign language. Dušková (1969) gives examples of characteristic German transfer errors in the English of her Czech students (e.g. become used for get, also for then, will for want.) Ringbom (1986, 1987) found errors in the English of Finnish learners that were due to their knowledge of Swedish false cognates. My son's school decided in its wisdom to teach him some Spanish three weeks after starting him on Italian; his Spanish interlanguage subsequently included the unusual greetings buenas diores (for 'good day') and buenas nottes (for 'good night'). When learners select and over-use one primary counterpart from among the options available in the second language, this is often the word or expression that most resembles the mother-tongue word in some way. Such resemblances can of course be misleading, and numerous errors, both receptive and productive, are caused by 'false friends' in related languages. I once seriously upset a French student by telling him that he had made dramatic progress (French dramatique = disastrous). Some examples from German learners' writing, cited by Gnutzmann (1973):
• * take a place (German Platz = place or seat)
• * Very often he used to sit on that bank. (German Bank = bank or bench)
• * I am lucky that you have invited me. (German glücklich = lucky or happy)
• snake misused for snail (German Schnecke).
Similar errors occur when learners re-export words which have been borrowed from
other languages and changed their meanings, like French baskets ( = trainers) ...

Mike Swan

Comparative studies in the phonological L2 acquisition in bilingual pre-schools

Conclusions:

"1. Independent of their age, all subjects show a high range of interferences. This substantiates the claim that acquisitional strategies as known from older learners are fully in place at age 3;0.

2. With regard to mental categories, the data suggests that children depart primarily from their own sound system to approach the L2 sounds. This becomes evident in the interferences from the L1 and is especially noticeable in the sets of identical and equivalent sounds. The reason for this can be found in the area of perception (magnet effect) or of production (articulatory difficulties). But since these data only provide evidence for production, there are no final statements to be made.

Target-like or almost target-like productions are more revealing with regard to mental categories. They suggest that the subjects have already formed mental categories for L2 sounds and try to articulate them appropriately. However, the number of subjects who produced certain sounds exclusively target-like in the data is very small.

Finally, the tests have shown that the beginning of introduction to foreign language cannot take place early enough in a child's life, since even the three year olds show signs of interference. ...The data has shown that immersion is a useful means to purse these goals."

http://www.fmks-online.de/aktuelles_en.html

Other studies

The Effects of L2 Proficiency on L3 Phonological Acquisition: A Preliminary Test of the L2 Proficiency Hypothesis
http://www.lingref.com/cpp/slrf/2011/paper2915.pdf

Cross-Linguistic Transfer in L2 and L3 Production
http://app.pte.hu/uprt2007/19_Letica-Maredsic.pdf

Third Language Acquisition: CrossLinguistic Influence from L1 and L2
https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/tfg/2015/141233/TFG_javierapazduhalde.pdf

Interference of first language in the acquisition of second language
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.6401&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Language Interference and Language Learning Techniques Transfer in L2 and L3 Immersion Programmes
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050208667761

Inhibiting your native language: the role of retrieval-induced forgetting during second-language acquisition.

This result supports the idea that inhibition plays a functional role in overcoming interference during the early stages of second-language acquisition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17362374

Learning a language? Sleep on it and you’ll get the grammar

Research in adults and children has shown that the brain continues to process new memories during sleep, allowing them to become stronger, more resistant to interference – and better integrated with existing knowledge. Our findings advance these theories by showing that sleep may also be necessary for discovering regular patterns across individual episodes and encoding these in the brain."

http://theconversation.com/learning-a-l ... mmar-40605

Processing Metrical Information in Silent Reading: An ERP Study

A growing body of recent research has demonstrated that visual language processing covertly activates phonological representations at different levels: individual phonemes (Frost, 1998), sub-phonemic properties such as phonetic length (Abramson and Goldinger, 1997) and supra-segmental features such as prosodic phrase boundaries (Steinhauer and Friederici, 2001; Roll et al., 2012; Schremm et al., 2015). Word stress is likewise activated in silent reading (Ashby and Clifton, 2005), which manifests as interference with the orthographic and lexico-semantic processing of these words...

Buenas naches.

[Decidida]

I can mix any languages. They don’t have to be related at all. But I also find that some languages seem to be inherently “stronger” than others. I mean that I don’t necessarily speak them better, but that the language somehow takes over my brain and kicks out the other languages. That was one of the reasons I dropped Esperanto. Every time I worked on it, it would get stuck in my brain and I would have trouble switching to another language. German is also like that, but I don’t want to drop German, so I’m trying to deal with it. I spoke it last night and even though I studied two other languages after that and chatted in English, I still woke up this morning with my thoughts in German. The thing is, my German is really bad. I can hardly speak at all, but even so, it takes over my brain and kicks out the other languages, even my everyday languages, Norwegian and English. I had to force myself to think for a few minutes in a couple of other languages this morning, and now it seems OK. I think it’s just a matter of practice, as the others have said.

I started thinking in Creole far quicker than Spanish. The grammar structures are different, and I wonder if that somehow makes a difference.

I think the learning materials and experiences I have make a difference, too.

[Cainntear]

For me, interference has always seemed to be an issue of languages learning to coexist.

I learned Italian and French in high school, and I don't really mix them. I learned Spanish and Scottish Gaelic at more or less the same time and I usually found myself getting interference from Italian and French, with Gaelic and Spanish rarely interfering with each other. In fact, the only situation where I'd find myself mixing Gaelic and Spanish was if I was trying to talk about Spain in Gaelic or the Scottish islands in Spanish.

I haven't been using my languages much in the last few years, though, and I often find my brain takes a while to pick through the muddle of rules and vocabulary before it can confidently produce whatever language I'm trying to.