Fragen der Sprachverarbeitung und des Sprachbewusstseins am Beispiel des Deutschen als L2, des Englischen als L3 und des Schwedischen als L4 polnischer Germanistikstudenten

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the processing of four simultaneously activated languages, that is, Polish as L1, German as L2, English as L3 and Swedish as L4, in written L4 production. Errors which can be attributed to negative transfer and interference, as well as the participants’ ability to exploit the similarities between the languages, which reflects their language awareness, are analysed here. As the results show, all the four languages are indeed activated and participate in the processing, but at the same time a lot of intralingual interaction between Swedish words and structures can be observed, and despite the language distance, the native language also remains an important source of transfer and interference.

Keywords

• multilingualism
• language processing
• cross-linguistic and intralingual interaction
• language awareness