The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This book, which includes 12 chapters by distinguished researchers in the field of second language acquisition, traces the conceptual history of language transfer from its early role within a Contrastive Analysis framework to its current position within Universal Grammar. The introduction presents a continuum of thought starting from the late 70s, a time in which major rethinking in the field regarding the concept of language transfer was beginning to take place, and continuing through the present day in which language transfer is integrated within current concepts and theoretical models. The afterword unites the issues discussed and allows the reader to place these issues in the context of future research. For the present book, the 1983 edition has been thoroughly revised, and some papers have been replaced and added.

When people attempt to learn a new language, the language(s) they already know can help but also hinder their understanding or production of new forms. This phenomenon, known as language transfer, is the focus of this book. The collection offers new theoretical perspectives, some in the empirical studies and some in other chapters, and consists of four sections considering lexical, syntactic, phonological and cognitive perspectives. The volume provides a wealth of studies on the influence of Chinese on the acquisition of English but also includes studies involving Finnish, French, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Spanish, Swedish and Tamil. It will be of great interest to researchers and students working in the areas of crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition, language pedagogy and psycholinguistics.

When learners of a new language draw on their native language (or on any other that they may know), this earlier acquired linguistic knowledge may influence their success. Such cross-linguistic influence, also known as language transfer, has long raised questions about what linguists can predict about success in the new language and about what processes are involved in using prior knowledge. This book lucidly brings together many insights on transfer: e.g. on the relation between translation and transfer, the relation between comprehension and production, and the problem of how complete any predictions of difficulty may ever be. The discussions also explore implications for future research and for classroom practice. The book will thus serve as a reliable guide for teachers, researchers, translators, interpreters, and students curious about language contact.

Terence Odlin reconsiders a question that many language teachers and educational researchers have addressed: how much influence can a learner's native language have in making the acquisition of a new language easy or difficult? Transfer has long been a controversial issue, but many recent studies support the view that cross-linguistic influences can have an important impact on second language acquisition. Odlin analyzes and interprets research showing many ways in which similarities and differences between languages can influence the acquisition of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. In addition he provides a detailed look at work on other areas important for the study of transfer including discourse, individual variation, and sociolinguistic factors. Language teachers, applied linguists, and educational researchers will find this volume highly accessible and extremely valuable to their work.

This volume, dedicated to language transfer, starts out with state-of-the-art psycholinguistic approaches to language transfer involving studies on psycho-typological transfer, lexical interference and foreign accent. The next chapter on Transfer in Language Learning, Contact, and Change presents new empirical data from several languages (English, German, Russian, French, Italian) on various transfer phenomena ranging from second language acquisition and contact-induced change in word order to cross-linguistic influences in word formation and the lexicon. Transfer in Applied Linguistics scrutinizes, on the one hand, the external sources of language transfer by investigating bilingual resources and the school context, but also by pointing out the differences in academic language in multilingual adolescents. On the other hand, internal sources of language transfer in multilingual classrooms are illuminated. A final chapter directs its focus on methodological issues that arise when more than one language is studied systematically and it offers a solution on causal effects for the investigation of heritage language proficiencies. The chapter also includes studies that exploit more innovative methodologies on L1 identification and clitic acquisition.

The chapters in this volume represent an approach to the notion of language transfer which reflects the paradigm shift originating from cognitive science. The perception and expression of ideas and events in one language in terms of another language is considered only a special case of one of the fundamental processes in human problem solving-reasoning by analogy. Transfer in language production is seen as a basic metaphorical concept denoting language interaction that must be discussed in connection with other metaphorical concepts denoting language interaction as well. If this is true, the assessment of language transfer in light of the production paradigm has hardly begun. It will continue to be a topic of far-reaching consequences for a theory of language processing and language acquisition.