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Researchers have long used the terms crosslinguistic influence and language transfer interchangeably, a practice which assumes that some kind of influence is essential to the phenomenon of "transfer." This chapter considers the notion of influence not only in second language acquisition (SLA) but also in a field sometimes considered tangential to SLA: linguistic relativity. Recent investigations indicate that the two fields do indeed have some common concerns, especially in regard to what some second language researchers have called conceptual transfer.
Before considering conceptual transfer, however, a survey of recent studies of crosslinguistic influence will give a sense of the many dimensions of contemporary transfer research. Some investigations of L2 phonetics and phonology have foregrounded the role of crosslinguistic influence (e.g., Aoyama, Flege, Guran,
Akathane-Yamoda, & Yamoda, 2004; Hancin-Bhatt, 2000; McAllister, Flege, & Piske, 2002), as has some work on speech perception (e.g., Flege & MacKay, 2004). Some lexical studies have likewise emphasized the importance of transfer (e.g., Jiang, 2002; Singleton, 2004; Zimmerman, 2004), and some have looked at transfer in morphology (e.g., De Angelis & Selinker, 2001; Herwig, 2001). There have also been studies of transfer in reading (e.g., Upton & Lee-Thompson, 2001) and pragmatics (e.g., Kwon, 2003; Tamanaha, 2003; Yu, 2004).
Syntactic structures have also been investigated in relation to crosslinguistic influence, as in a study of relative clauses by Matthews and Yip (2003), as well as a look at a wider range of structures where influence from the L1 seems evident (Chan, 2004). There have likewise been several studies within the framework of Universal Grammar where the possible influence of the L1 gets attention (e.g., Hertel, 2003; Juffs, 2002; White, 2003).
Several studies of various structures have offered especially convincing evidence of transfer, as with one of causatives by Helms-Park (2001), another by her of copular verbs (2003), one of grammatical gender by Sabourin (2001), two of lexis by Ringbom (2001, 2004) as well as one by Cenoz (2001), one of morphological awareness (Koda, 2000), one of L1 orthographic influence on L2 (Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003), and one of the grammatical marking of topic continuity by Nakahama (2003). The nine studies just cited are especially convincing because all employ a methodology where the learners studied do not all speak the same L1...