Beneficial effect of multilingualism in resolving L3 structural complexity: Attention shift from familiar cue to critical cue*

Abstract

Linguistic Research 39(Special Edition): 1-27. Multilingualism is known to be influential in subsequent language learning due to linguistic transfer (Flynn et al. 2004; Bardel and Falk 2007; Rothman 2011; Westergaard et al. 2017) or enhanced metalinguistic awareness achieved from L2 learning experience (Thomas 1988; Klein 1995; Sanz 2000; Jaensch 2009; Park and Starr 2015). This study examines the complexity of word order scrambling in L3 Korean from cross-linguistic perspective, and investigates the influence of L2 learning experience in L3 acquisition by novice early bilingual learners (English-Chinese/Malay) in Singapore (n=148). An untimed grammaticality judgement task (GJT), which manipulates Case-assigning cues (e.g. word order, animacy and case-marking morphemes) for competition, was employed to investigate an impact of word order scrambling and item grammaticality. Given different cue hierarchy among involved languages, learners experience a challenge in unlearning L1 reliance on word order and animacy cues in Case assignment and adjusting to the novel cue hierarchy of L3 Korean. Conflicting information between animacy cue and word order cue triggers negative judgment on the GJT regardless of the sentences’ true grammaticality. Irrespective of typological proximity of L2, L2 learning experience is found to be facilitative in the acquisition of scrambled structure of L3, conditionally on ungrammatical sentences. We argue that these findings imply that general L2 learning experience benefits learners with control ability to effectively conform to a new cue hierarchy based on L3 exposure, and that such enhanced metalinguistic awareness is more visible when learners are handling tasks that require explicit knowledge.