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Mother and Other Tongue Influence on Learner French

A Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

David Singleton
David Singleton
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Extract

Recent perspectives on language transfer have highlighted the role of psychotypology and have given new life to Newmark's ignorance hypothesis. This paper examines such perspectives in the light of a body of data in French from a beginning learner of that language whose native language is English but who in addition has some knowledge of Irish, Latin, and Spanish. The fact that Spanish emerges as a privileged transfer source seems to point to a psychotypology factor, and certain distributional and contextual evidence appears to show that ignorance is in many cases triggering thè transfers. However, because ignorance does not seem to explain all cases, some speculation is entered into, on the basis of clues in the data, regarding the role of memory codes in transfer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , October 1987 , pp. 327 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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