engleski

Cross-lexical interactions in relation to metalinguistic awareness and multilingual proficiency in the acquisition of Russian as L3

The paper deals with the study of cross-lexical interactions (CLI) and their relation to metalinguistic awareness and multilingual proficiency in the acquisition of Russian as L3. The participants were Croatian students majoring in English and Russian language and literature at the University of Zagreb. The aim of our study was to look into the role of metalinguistic awareness and multilingual proficiency in determining the frequency and the source language of cross-lexical influence in Russian language production by multilingual users. In the description of their Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (DMM), Herdina and Jessner (2002) emphasize the significance of multilingual proficiency, which is seen as the assumed level of acquired knowledge in the language systems of the multilingual speaker. According to the authors, the acquisition of more than two language systems leads as well to the enhanced level of metalinguistic awareness (Herdina & Jessner, 2002, p. 62). Therefore, both metalingusitic awareness and multilingual proficiency seem to be determinant factors in the explanation of cross-lexical interactions among multilingual students. Firstly, language learning background questionnaire was used, which included data on the years of language learning, students' self- assessment on language proficiency in all the three languages and exposure to languages. Students were also given a short general questionnaire on metalinguistic awareness. Then, a synonym provision task was used as the main instrument to measure the instances of CLI in the written Russian language production. The task was based on a synonym/antonym provision task used by Ó Laoire and Singleton (2009) and synonym provision task used by Letica Krevelj (2014). Having completed the task on providing synonyms, students were asked to retrospect on their lexical search, in other words, they had to explain the process of searching the lexis. Since the language constellaton included the three languages, two of which belong to the same subgroup, that is the Slavic subgroup of languages (Croatian and Russian) and one to the Germanic subgroup of languages (English), we assumed more lexical interactions between Croatian and Russian than English and Russian. Moreover, the results showed that, apart from students' high level of proficiency in Croatian and English and their metalinguistic awareness, there are other factors, like exposure to languages, psychotypology and recency, that should be taken into consideration while dealing with cross-linguistic studies in multilingual language acquisition.

cross-lexical transfer, metalinguistic awareness, proficiency, Russian as L3

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