Publication details
The importance of individual data in L3 acquisition: A reanalysis of Mitrofanova, Leivada, and Westergaard (2023)
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Chapter in a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | We re-examine a recent contribution by Mitrofanova, Leivada, and Westergaard (2023) to the debate on wholesale vs. property-by-property transfer in L3 acquisition. They argued that results from their artificial-language experiment support the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) because in three of four conditions, the L3-Russian-Norwegian group’s mean acceptance fell ‘between’ those of the L2-Russian and L2-Norwegian groups. Our reanalysis of their original data reveals that those ‘between’ results stem from bimodal/continuous distributions, not from unimodal distributions centering around a ‘between’ result. We next inspected each individual’s cross-conditional response patterns, grouping them into response profiles, to test three logically possible versions of LPM-generated predictions. Qualitative analyses show all three fail. We end with a methodological discussion of testing for transfer in L3 models. |