Language of instruction affects language interference in the third language

Tomoschuk, Brendan; Duyck, Wouter; Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Ferreira, Victor S.; Gollan, Tamar H. · 2021 · Bilingualism Language and Cognition

DOI: 10.1017/s1366728921000043

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Summary

This study investigates how the language of instruction influences cross-lingual interference in trilinguals, challenging the prevailing view that interference is driven solely by cognitive factors like proficiency or age of acquisition. The authors address the "foreign language effect," where non-native languages (L2 and L3) interfere with each other more strongly than with the native language (L1). They propose that learning an L3 through a specific language provides practice in inhibiting that language, thereby modulating interference patterns. The research comprises two experiments. Experiment 1 tested 46 Dutch–English–French trilinguals using a phoneme monitoring task adapted from Colomé (2001). Participants viewed pictures and determined if a cued phoneme was present in the target language name. The design included conditions where phonemes were present in the target language, present in a non-target translation, or absent in all languages. Experiment 2 involved 95 Dutch–English bilinguals who learned an artificial L3 vocabulary via retrieval practice. Participants were assigned to learn the L3 either through their L1 (Dutch) or L2 (English). After training, they performed the same phoneme monitoring task in the novel L3 to assess whether the language of instruction reduced interference from that specific language. In Experiment 1, results confirmed the foreign language effect: when monitoring in L3 French, interference from L2 English was greater than from L1 Dutch. Specifically, phonemes present in the English translation caused longer response times and more false alarms than those present only in the Dutch translation. Experiment 2 demonstrated that language of instruction modulated these effects. Bilinguals who learned the L3 through their L1 exhibited stronger interference from their L1 compared to their L2, whereas those who learned through their L2 showed greater interference from their L2. This suggests that the learning context provides specific practice in managing interference from the instructional language. The findings indicate that language interference is not determined exclusively by static cognitive factors like proficiency but is also shaped by the learning environment. The language used to instruct L3 acquisition appears to provide targeted practice in inhibiting that language, reducing its interference during L3 production. This implies that the "foreign language effect" may be partially attributable to the shared learning conditions of non-native languages rather than their status alone. These results have implications for understanding multilingual lexical access and suggest that instructional methods can influence the cognitive control mechanisms underlying language selection.

Key finding

The language used to instruct learners in a third language determines which previously known language exerts greater lexical interference during third-language processing.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 141

Provenance

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Topics

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• dual task performance