Influencia interlingüística y transferencia morfosintáctica en los aprendientes de español como lengua tercera (EL3) en el País Vasco Norte (Francia)

This study focuses on the issue of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) throughout the acquisition process of Spanish as an L3 by bilingual French/Basque children. Specifically, we are interested in gender concord within the Determiner Phrase (DP) and the formation of nominal compounds (N + N and deverbals). French and Spanish share the same characteristics regarding the two phenomena, as they display two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine), and compounds are head-initial. Conversely, there is no grammatical gender in Basque and compounds are head-final. This configuration of languages, together with the different profiles of our bilingual participants, allows us to explore cross-linguistic influence from the initial stages of acquisition of L3 Spanish through the most common factors in the field of L3 acquisition, namely typology, use and order of acquisition of the first two languages. Overall, an influence of French (typologically and structurally closer) would have a facilitating effect, while Basque would have an inhibitory one. In order to explore these possibilities of influence, we administered a written image description task to elicit 1) phrases made up of a determinant, a noun and a color adjective (e.g., “una casa roja”, “a red house”), 2) N + N compounds (e.g., “hombre rana”, “frogman”) and 3) deverbal compounds (e.g., “abrebotellas”, “bottle opener”) to 52 bilingual children (French/Basque, age: 10–11 years) learning Spanish as an L3, and to a control group of 21 native speakers of Spanish of the same age. The L3 participants were divided into three groups, based on their dominant language: L1 Basque, L1 French, and 2L1 Basque/French. From the data collected, we analyzed the level of accuracy for the target structures in relation to the most commonly studied factors in L2 acquisition. Regarding grammatical gender, we considered the transparency of the ending (-a/-o), the default gender and the analogical criterion. Concerning the compounds, we studied directionality (head-initial vs. head-final) and the productivity of both types of compound. As for the deverbals, we also studied their formal characteristics (verbal inflection and generic -s). In line with the results of previous research on Spanish grammatical gender, the highest error rates occur with feminine, which points to a strategy of using masculine as the default gender. We also found that the effect of the transparency of the ending was greater with Basque-dominant speakers, who acquired French later in a formal context and do not use it at home on a daily basis. In contrast, the analogical criterion seems to be favoured by speakers who acquired French at home and use it every day. As for the compounds, given the high percentages of compounds with the correct directionality, our results suggest a facilitating effect of French for all participants, regardless of age or order of acquisition of their L1/L2. In general, French, the closer language, seems to exert a more direct influence on the process of acquisition of L3 Spanish, but Basque seems to have some influence in terms of the metalinguistic strategies used by our participants.

Keyphrases: Spanish, cross-linguistic influence, typological proximity, structural proximity, dominant language, grammatical gender, deverbal compounds, N + N compounds, hirugarren hizkuntza jabekuntza, hurbiltasun tipologikoa, izen-izen hitz elkartuak