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The Influence of L2 on the Syntactic Processing of L1 by Arab EFL Learners

By approaching syntactic processing through the Competition Model research paradigm, the present study examines how Arab university students assign the subject to the sentence of their mother-tongue (Arabic). The question of this study, therefore, is whether the advanced EFL learners processing of L1 syntax differs from that of EFL beginners in some respect. The subjects of the study (Ss) were 72 Saudi university students, adults belonging to either a 'mono-lingual' university group (36 students) or to a 'bilingual' university group (36 students) majoring in English language. Overall, bilingual Ss displayed better performance as compared to their monolingual peers. Although, there were no significant effects for word order, other significant effects such as animacy have shown up primarily in NVN sentences in the performance of the bilingual Ss. When the two sentences have animate nouns, our bilingual Ss scored significantly higher on both VNN and NNV. This result shows that bilingual Ss used the benefit of their knowledge of the L2 to better process these sentences. The bilingual Ss showed more preference only for N1 subjective in VNN than did the monolingual group, when we speak about case ending factor. This demonstrates that bilingual Ss show greater preference for a cue than the monolingual Ss. The overall results indicate that the differences between the performance of both the monolingual and bilingual Ss were mainly due to the overall changed state of the L2 users (i.e. their multicompetence). Introduction It is commonly believed that the first language (L1) has an effect on the second language (L2). An English native speaker, for example, can tell whether someone is French or Arab after few words of English. Second language acquisition (SLA) literature has shown extensive research on how the learning and use of an L2 is affected by the L1, whether conceived as contrastive analysis, transfer, crosslinguistic influence, resetting of parameters or in many other ways. Recently, researchers have begun testing the hypothesis that the second language influences the first or what sometimes is called reverse or backward transfer (see for example: Cook, 2000; Kecskes & Papp, 2000; Grosjean, 2001; Joribio, 2001; Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002; Noor, 2007). In fact, a recent book by Vivian Cook (2003) has been devoted only to show the effects of L2 on L1. The Effect of L2 on L1 SLA literature has shown that the first language of bilinguals differs from their monolingual peers in diverse ways. Kecskes (1998), for example has found beneficial effects on the development and use of mother tongue skills with regard to structural well-formedness in Hungarian students of modern languages. Balcom (1995) found different acceptability judgments of French passive sentences in Francophone speakers who did or did not know English. Hungarian children who know English use measurably more complex sentences in their L1 than those who do not (Kecskes & Papp, 2000). Bialystok (2001) maintains that L2 user children have more precocious metalinguistic skills than their monolingual peers. Moreover, Caldas and Boudreaux (1999); Thomas, et al. (1993); and Hakuta (1986) found a correlation of bilingual proficiency with higher scores on standardized tests and tests of both 1 L2 user term becomes more widely used in SLA literature more than L2 learner who is usually compared with native speakers of the target language. SLA researches maintain that the L2 user is a person in his or her own right not an imitation of someone else. (For more discussion, see Cook, 1997; 2003:1-6; Grosjean, 1989).