To the Zoominar

In the field of third language (L3) acquisition, most recent research has investigated the source, the type, the extent and the timing of cross-linguistic influence (CLI), i.e., whether there is CLI from one or both previously acquired languages, whether CLI is facilitative or non-facilitative, whether CLI occurs wholesale, property-by-property or hybrid, as well as the role of CLI in L3 development from early to later stages of acquisition. Different L3 models have suggested factors such as order of acquisition (Bardel & Falk 2007, Jin 2009), language use (Fallah et al. 2016, Fallah & Jabari 2018), overall typological similarity (Rothman 2010, 2015), structural similarity (Westergaard et al. 2017, Westergaard 2021, Slabakova 2017) and cumulative input (Cabrelli & Iverson, 2023) leading to CLI in L3 acquisition and development.

This talk aims at contributing to ongoing debates in the field by discussing empirical data from four studies on (i) Russian-German heritage bilingual children acquiring L3 English in Germany (Kolb, Mitrofanova & Westergaard, 2022), (ii) Norwegian-English bilingual adolescents acquiring L3 German in Norway (Kolb, Guajardo & Westergaard, in prep.), (iii) Dutch-English bilingual adolescents acquiring L3 German/French in the Netherlands (van Osch, Kolb, Stadt, Luque, Anderssen & Westergaard, in prep.) as well as (iv) Norwegian-English bilingual adolescents acquiring L3 German/French/Spanish in Norway (van Osch, Kolb, Stadt, Luque, Anderssen & Westergaard, in prep.). The main research questions are whether CLI occurs from one or both previously acquired languages, and which factors lead to CLI in L3 acquisition in early and later stages of L3 acquisition and development. Overall, the results suggest that CLI occurs from both previously acquired languages with several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors playing a role.

Nadine Kolb