New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning

The 13 essays presented here offer lexical, syntactic, phonological, and cognitive perspectives on cross-linguistic transfer in second language learning. Linguistics scholars from China, North America, and the UK focus mainly on China and Chinese influence on the acquisition of English or vice versa, addressing the interaction of the age of the learner and the influence of the first language, the role of social contexts in acquisition, the structure of the second language lexicon, the relationship between transfer and perceptions of acceptability, and the use of current transfer research to shed light on language contact situations in the past, as well as the scope of transfer research. They discuss the organization of lexical knowledge in bilingual and multilingual minds, semantic transfer in spatial expressions, and the interaction of word meanings and visual arrays; topic prominence and transfer in argument structures in grammatical patterns; word-level stress and segmental phonology and retroflexion in Spanish; and the effect of transfer on the relationship between comprehension and production in Finnish and Swedish speakers and the role of linguistic and non-linguistic contexts in new language acquisition. Distributed in the US by UTP Distribution. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Liming Yu is Professor Emeritus, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and President of the China Educational Linguistics Association. His research interests have focused on language transfer in second language acquisition, the disciplinary nature of second language acquisition and theory and practice in bilingual education. He has published extensively, including Language Transfer in Language Learning (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).
Terence Odlin is Associate Professor Emeritus of English, Ohio State University, USA and his research interests focus on language contact and language transfer. He is the author of Language Transfer (Cambridge University Press) and editor or co-editor of four other volumes. He has also published articles and chapters in several journals and edited volumes.