crosslinguistic influence in l3 french acquisition: the case of persian bilinguals of english

Research credits learners’ deficiencies in the production of ln to various factors, including morphosyntactic properties of previously acquired languages. in the sea of research on cli, scant studies investigated cli across several linguistic modules. the current study investigates crosslinguistic influence (cli) in persian learners of french (l3). for this aim, persian speakers of english learning french as their l3 (n=57); were compared with persian (n=83) and english (n=32) learners of french (l2), examining ten linguistic properties within morphological, syntactic, and semantic linguistic domains. linguistic proximity, typological proximity, cumulative enhancement, and scalpel models were tested to determine whether cli occurs holistically or selectively from one or both of the previously acquired languages. for the experiment, we conducted an acceptability judgment task of the structures under investigation and evaluated l3 learners’ proficiency in the previously acquired languages to confirm their advanced/native-like proficiency. we predicted simultaneous facilitative and non-facilitative cli in l3ers due to the conflicting nature of l1 and l2. the findings suggest that cli happens on a property-by-property basis, for the l3ers were different from l2ers in two of the properties, while they either performed like the other l2ers or the more accurate l2 group in other experimental structures. these results confirm tpm, lpm, cem, and sm depending on the linguistic property. in sum, the varied developmental/acquisition slopes of the properties, their complexity, and saliency justify the divergent performances of l2 and l3ers across different linguistic structures.