English-Spanish bilingual learners of Portuguese as a third language: non-redundant acquisition and its typological nature

Rothman, J., Giancaspro, D. and Halloran, B. (2014) English-Spanish bilingual learners of Portuguese as a third language: non-redundant acquisition and its typological nature. In: Amaral, P. and Carvalho, A. M. (eds.) Portuguese/Spanish Interfaces. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 317-334. ISBN 9789027258007

Abstract/Summary

This chapter has two goals: (a) to discuss the Spanish-Portuguese interface in current formal language acquisition research and (b) to highlight the contributions of this language pairing in the emerging field of formal third language acquisition. The authors discuss two L3 acquisition studies (Montrul, Dias, & Santos, 2011; Giancaspro, Halloran, & Iverson, in press) examining Differential Object Marking, a morphological case marker present in Spanish but not in Portuguese, arguing that the results show how data from Spanish-English bilinguals learning Brazilian Portuguese as an L3 illuminate the deterministic role of structural and typological similarity in linguistic transfer. The data provide supportive evidence for only one of three existing L3 transfer models: the Typological Proximity Model (Rothman, 2010, 2011, 2013).