Abstract
Multilingualism has grown as a natural extension of first and then second language acquisition, therefore the general understanding what some fundamental concepts, such as the initial state (S0), mean in multilingual developmental research has grown blurry over the years. Apart from meta-linguistic knowledge and strategies and other aspects, such as age, motivation, environmental factors, previously learnt languages might influence or even determine the success of a language learner’s endeavor to learn a next language.
In this paper, we reflect on what syntactic knowledge multilingual learners have when starting to learn a next language and what role accumulated linguistic knowledge plays in the development of a subsequent language over time. In other words, here we attempt to define what S0 for multilingual acquisition is.
The paper concludes that the temporal sequencing of full-fledged language grammars in the mind of a learner prior to the acquisition of Ln loses its validity as the fundament to model syntactic development in language acquisition. It follows that Aronin’s (Dominant language constellation as a method of research. Contribution to the thematic symposium: multi-competence and dominant language constellations. Paper presented at the 10th International Conference on L3 Acquisition and Multilingualism, Vienna, Austria, 2016) Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) can be used as a tool to evaluate what syntactic knowledge learners can draw upon, which would imply that developmental research is in the position to look at learners from the multilingual perspective, i.e. it may focus on to discover how languages might be connected in the mind of a learner.
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Notes
- 1.
For the sake of simplicity, multilingual acquisition will be often referred to as L3 acquisition, regardless whether the new target language is acquired as the third, fourth, etc. in time by the learner.
- 2.
- 3.
Indeed, it seems to be a general finding in L1 acquisition that L1 learners build upon knowledge of the free relative to construct lexically headed relative clauses (see Hamburger 1980, Flynn and Lust 1980 for English; Packard 1988 for Mandarin; Lee 1991, Lee et al. 1990 for Korean; Murasugi 1991 for Japanese; Foley 1996 for French; Somashekar 1999 for Tulu; Mróz 2010 for Polish; Flynn et al. 2004 for Kazakh).
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Fernández-Berkes, É., Flynn, S. (2020). Where DLC Meets Multilingual Syntactic Development. In: Lo Bianco, J., Aronin, L. (eds) Dominant Language Constellations. Educational Linguistics, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52336-7_4
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