The Acquisition of Negation in English as L3

Recently, the number of trilinguals and multilinguals israpidly increasing but most of the studies of cross-linguisticinfluences have concentrated only on the effect of LIon L2and not on the effects of L1 and/or L2 on the acquisition ofa third language (i.e. L3). This research tried to concentrateon this aspect and specially focused on the acquisition ofnegation in English as an L3 by Turkish-Persian bilinguals.The reason for choosing negation was that many learners find syntactic negation problematic and different languagesput their negative particles in different positions in thesentence. For the purpose of this paper, the three languages werecompared, and predictions were made on the basis of thesecomparisons. 40 participants (20 adults and 20 children)chosen by stratified random sampling took part in writtenand oral production tests, and then they were divided intotwo halves on the basis of their proficiency levels(elementary and advanced). The written test consisted of 30questions, and the interviews included a number ofquestions eliciting negative productions, and each onelasted for about 15 minutes. Incorrect negative utterances extracted from the tests/interviews were analyzed and compared, and then predictions were made following Contrastive Analysis (CA) guidelines. The researchers came to two important conclusions: first, interference or negative transfer was not the only source of errors, and CA predictions should not be completely trusted. Second, L2 (here, Persian) was more dominant and effective in the participants productions ofnegations in L3 (here, English).