The Role of the Cognitive Status of Structures in CLI in Acquisition of English as the Third Language by Persian Bilinguals

Abstract

This study aimed at finding the impact of the cognitive status of the structures on the acquisition of third language (L3) English at the initial stages. To measure implicit and explicit knowledge, 85 participants were tested regarding placement of adjective phrase (AP) and partitive structure (PS) by using four instruments: a timed and an untimed grammaticality judgment tasks, a metalinguistic knowledge test, and an elicited oral imitation task. The participants included four groups; the first two had Azeri as their L1 and Persian as their L2, but used Azeri and Persian as the language of communication (LOC) respectively, and the third one had Persian as the L1, Azeri as the L2, and Persian as LOC. The control group used Persian as the L1 and English as the L2. While AP in English and Azeri has similar pre-nominal syntax, in Persian, it is post-nominal. Unlike AP, PS which specifies the parts out of a whole (e.g. two of my brothers) patterns similarly in Persian and English, meaning the part-whole pattern, whereas in Azeri the whole precedes the part. The results challenge the previous models (e.g. the L1 Factor, Hermas, 2010; the L2 Status Factor, Bardel & Falk, 2007; the Cumulative Enhancement Model, Flynn et al., 2004; the Typological Proximity Model, Rothman, 2010) and are compatible with the Contact Language of Communication (Fallah, Jabbari, & Fazilatfar, 2016). Considering cross-linguistic influence as an ongoing dynamic phenomenon, this study proposes that at the initial stages of TLA, the cognitive status of structures is the main determining factor in specifying the source of syntactic transfer.