Publications

Lexical crosslinguistic influence in Basque-Spanish bilinguals’ English (L3) writing

Year
2019
Journal
International Journal of Bilingua Education and Bilingualism
DOI
ISSN

The present research examines the effects of a number of factors oncrosslinguistic influence (CLI) in Basque-Spanish bilinguals’ third language(L3) writing. The main focus is on the levels of adapted and non-adaptedloan words as illustrative of CLI. A quantitative analysis explores theimpact of typology and proficiency in the target and the sourcelanguages. Language proficiency was evaluated in 399 compositions, 133written in each language (Basque, Spanish and English). The adapted andnon-adapted loan words found in English compositions were classifiedaccording to their source-language, word category, word class and type/token categories. The results pointed at language typology as the mainpredictor of the source-language of CLI. Additionally, a linear associationwas detected between the learners’ degree of proficiency in the targetlanguage and the frequency of the CLI instances or adapted and nonadapted loan words. The overall results show that bilingual students usetheir entire linguistic repertoire to write in their third language (English).