Acquisition of sentence pattern by Persian (L1) Learners of English (L2) and Spanish (L3)

This research aimed to study the role of transfer at the initial states of third language (L3) acquisition. The following hypotheses were investigated in this study: (a): The L1 Factor, (Hermas, 2010, 2014a, 2014b); (b) The Second Language Transfer Hypothesis (“L2 Status Factor”, Bardel and Falk, 2007); and No Transfer Hypothesis (Clahsen and Muysken, 1986; 1989). The participants were 30 Persian learners of Spanish (L3) who have acquired English as second language. The structures tested in this study were word order schemes on the mentioned languages. The L3 learners were tested at the initial states of their Spanish acquisition with upper intermediate levels and lower intermediate ones on their second language. The data were gathered through production and perception tasks. The results indicate that proficiency is an influential factor inlanguage transfer and upper intermediate learners perform better than lower-intermediate ones. Both groups transfer sentential structure mostly from L2. So, the second language hypothesis is supported by this study. This research will be useful for Spanish teachers to find out the teaching difficulties and try to solve the problems.

کلیدواژه ها:

English Language ، Persian Language ، Sentence Pattern ، Spanish Language ، Third language acquisition