Re: Language Fluency

John Quijada said:
>
> I speak both Spanish and Portuguese without interference
> between the two, but encounter definite interference between Spanish and
> Italian:  the two times in my life I've spent months studying Italian
> prior to extended trips there (14 years ago and currently), it has had a
> detrimental impact on my Spanish, in that my Spanish vocabulary becomes
> infused with Italian words, sometimes to the extent that I couldn't recall
> the Spanish word.
Interference is a phenomenon that occurs during a certain window along the
course of a person's acquisition trajectory for a particular L2. If you
grew up bilingual in Spanish and Portuguese, neither one was ever an L2
for you. If you learned one (or both) of them as an L2, then you probably
did have a stage where there was some interference between them and/or
your L1.

It sounds like your acquisition of Italian is currently in the
interference stage, and that you've passed through it for Spanish and
Portuguese if either or both is an L2 for you.

Some L2 learners never leave the interference stage entirely, especially
in the case of phonological interference. I believe that's because these
speakers tend to largely cease acquisition (which requires a certain
motivational posture in addition to the presence of L2 input -- see
Krashen) soon after their L2 has become "good enough" for their
communicative purposes.


> My guess is that, at least for me, the interference is at a phonemic and
> phonotactical level in that, despite the closer genetic relationship
> between Spanish and Portuguese, their phonology (particularly their
> phonemic inventory and phonotactical and phonaesthetic rules) is more
> dissimilar than between Spanish and Italian.  Simply put, Italian and
> Spanish words sound more alike than Portuguese words.
The mental lexicon has a good bit of organization that is based on
phonotactics[1], which is one of the reasons why we wouldn't predict much
interference between, say, Inuktitut and Vietnamese (another reason being
the absence of cognates) for L2 learners who happen to have those
languages in contact.

I can't make any statement, from where I'm sitting, about the comparative
phonotactics[1] of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian -- but somebody else
probably can.


[1] Actually, this lexical organization involves the entire metrical
hierarchy, not just phonotactics in the more limited sense of segment
grammar.


-- Mark

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