Inflectional marking in initial L3 productions at first exposure
Résumé
Expanding upon research on “first exposure” populations (learners who have had no prior systematic exposure to the target language) (Carroll 2013; Dimroth et al. 2013), this contribution discusses to what extent absolute beginners exposed to Modern Arabic as a new foreign language (an L3 in this case) can retrieve words and morphological structures from the input and generalize to new forms that are absent in the input. More specifically, we discuss the role of learners’ L2 background languages in the recognition and creation of verbal forms in the new L3. The results show that crosslinguistic influence of L2 Romance langages operates in a selective way, property-by-property in L3 processing and that learners are sensitive to structural similarity across their L2 backgroung languages.