Mr Bean exits the garage driving or does he drive out of the garage? Bidirectional transfer in the expression of Path

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines bidirectional transfer between L1 English and L2 Spanish in the motion domain, both in boundary crossing [BC] and non-boundary crossing [NBC] situations. It focuses on the semantic component of Path. Furthermore, it examines whether learners’ proficiency has an impact on the degree of cross-linguistic influence [CLI] between their L1 and L2. An experimental study was conducted with five groups of informants: an English monolingual group, a Spanish monolingual group and three groups of L1 English learners of L2 Spanish. The findings support the existence of bidirectional transfer. The three groups of learners exhibited L1 typological patterns when retelling motion events in L2: (a) they used fewer path verbs than the monolingual Spanish group in BC and NBC; (b) they produced examples of satellites encoding the Path in BC and NBC; and (c) they expressed event conflation with one main verb in BC. In addition, the L2 influenced the L1, although this influence was restricted to learners with higher levels of L2 proficiency who used more path verbs than the monolingual English group. These results provide evidence for the role of bidirectional transfer in second language acquisition.