Acquisition of genericity in L2 English: the effect of multilingualism

Abstract

This study explores the acquisition of genericity in English as a second language (L2) by analysing judgments of singular noun phrases' acceptability across generic contexts. We sampled three groups acquiring L2 English: L1-Norwegian L2-English learners, L1-Polish L2-English learners (bilingual group), and L1 Polish L2 English learners also acquiring Norwegian as a third language (multilingual group). Our findings confirm a selective effect of native language transfer in the Norwegian group, arguably due to L1–L2 similarities. Within the Polish groups, we found that knowledge of another language with articles positively impacted the understanding of genericity, with the multilingual group showing more nuanced acceptance of the target-like form–meaning choices, compared to the bilingual group. At the same time, the bilingual group performed better on two proficiency measures. Furthermore, we assessed participants' knowledge of the English article system. The multilingual group outperformed the bilingual group, thus suggesting that a better grasp of the L2 article system correlated with the ability to comprehend generic forms more accurately.

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ORCID for Roumyana Slabakova: orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-460X

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