Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

occurred mainly "on grammatical categories absent in either the NL or TL" and not
in word order.
LoCoco also found that second level Spanish students showed an increase in
interference type errors that LoCoco calls "whole expression terms", or word-forword
translations of an L1 expression, which is similar to what Duskova reported.
2. First language influence is weaker in bound morphology.
Duskova (1969) notes that errors in bound morphology (e.g. omission of plurals on
nouns, lack of subject-verb agreement, adjective-noun agreement) are not due to
first language influence in her Czech students of EFL: Czech nouns do not
distinguish singular and plural and in Czech "the finite verb agrees with its subject
in person and number". These errors are, rather, "interference between the other
terms of the English subsystem in question" (p. 21). Moreover, these errors "occur
even in cases where the English form is quite analogous to the corresponding Czech
form" (p. 21). Of 166 morphological errors, only nineteen were judged as due to
Czech interference. (interestingly, of these nineteen, several were free morphemes;
see discussion in Chapter 4.)
Also consistent is Kellerman's (forthcoming) suggestion that inflectional
morphology ("except in very closely related languages") belongs to the category of
structure that performers generally do not transfer in second language performance.
3. First language influence seems to be strongest in "acquisition poor"
environments.
Dulay and Burt (1974b) and Gillis and Weber (1976) have demonstrated that first
language influence is rare in child second language acquisition (but see below). On
the other hand, studies that report a high amount of first language influence, such as
those cited above, are mostly foreign and not second language studies, situations in
which natural appropriate intake is scarce and where translation exercises are
frequent. In this regard, it is interesting to note that we can find signs of first
language influence in immersion bilingual programs where input is often primarily
from the teacher and not from peers.
66