The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp. 661-674
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Received 25 May 2022 Revised 10 Jul 2022 Accepted 30 Jul 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202207.661

The Role of L2 Proficiency in the Backward Transfer of L3 on the Interpretation of L2 Reflexives
Hee-Don Ahn ; Yongjoon Cho ; Jong-Bai Hwang ; Jung Hyun Lim ; Cui Mao
(first author) Professor, Dept. of English, Konkuk Univ. (hdahn@konkuk.ac.kr)
(co-author) Lecturer, Dept. of Korean, Konkuk Univ. (ycho@konkuk.ac.kr)
(co-author) Professor, Dept. of English Education, Konkuk Univ. (jongbai@konkuk.ac.kr)
(co-author) Postdoc, Dept. of English, Konkuk Univ. (dlightjlim@gmail.com)
(corresponding author) Associate Professor, School of Foreign languages, Shandong Univ. of Technology (623219460@qq.com)


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.
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Abstract

Situated in the context of third language acquisition, Ahn and Mao (2019) reported supportive evidence for the existence of backward transfer of L3 on the interpretation of L2 reflexives with three groups—a CE, a KE, and a CEK group. Nevertheless, whether the detected backward transfer was modulated by L2 proficiency remained unclear. As one of the potential contributing factors influencing crosslinguistic transfer, the role of L2 proficiency in the backward transfer needs to be clarified. The present study enrolled participants with CE, KE, and CEK language configurations and manipulated their L2 English proficiency levels to explore if L2-English proficiency modulated the backward transfer detected in the binding interpretation of normal and exempt anaphors with L2 and L3 learners. The results of the contrastive study did not reveal positive evidence for a decisive role of L2 proficiency, which indicated that the developmental path towards the target grammar of reflexive binding was not reflected by the general proficiency measured in traditional ways. Furthermore, the results reinforced the conclusion Ahn and Mao (2019) had drawn previously that the differentiating performance of the KE, the CE, and CEK group in the reflexive interpretations was less likely to be introduced by the significant difference in their L2 scores.

Keywords: reflexive, L3 acquisition, backward transfer, proficiency
Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Mineharu Nakayama for sharing his ideas and valuable inputs. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A5A2A03038771). / This paper was also supported by Konkuk University Researcher Fund in 2021.

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