Crosslinguistic Influence in Multilinguals

Reviews / Votes

An illuminating study of multilingualism based on original research on second and third language acquisition. Wai Lan Tsang's approach strikes a balance between theoretical rigour and empirical evidence and furthers our understanding of crosslinguistic influence in the grammars of multilingual speakers. * Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge, UK * This highly original volume breaks new ground in the study of the interaction between languages in the multilingual speaker's repertoire. It is an outstanding contribution to the study of grammar in third language acquisition and multilingualism because of the illuminating insights obtained from the combination of three languages, Cantonese, English and French. * Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Spain * A pioneer in third language acquisition in the East Asian context, Wai Lan Tsang shows how cross-linguistic influence in multilingual speakers can be both theoretically interesting and practically important. Her study is one of the most sophisticated to date on the phenomenon of reverse transfer. * Stephen Matthews, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong * The study addressed in this book not only can be considered as innovative and one of the most sophisticated of the studies examining the phenomenon of reverse transfer to date, but it also constitutes the first project analysing crosslinguistic influence in the L1 Chinese-L2 English-L3 French context. It provides an exceptional contribution to the study of the acquisition of grammatical structures from the typological perspective, as its author relies on the contributions of Cenoz (2001) and de Angelis (2007) on second and third language acquisition as the cornerstone for the study. -- Carmen Maria Ortiz Granero, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland * LINGUIST List 28.5293 * This book makes valuable contributions to the ongoing debate on how native and nonnative resources are being used in multilingual language production from a new perspective. A particular strength of this book is that as opposed to 'forward transfer', it focuses on reverse transfer, a largely neglected area in transfer studies in the context of TLA and multilingualism. -- Yi Wang * Chinese Language and Discourse 8:2 *