Language transfer
Novice Spanish students who are native English-speakers may produce a transfer error and use a preposition when it is not necessary because of their reliance on English.
Generally speaking, the more similar the two languages are and the more the learner is aware of the relation between them, the more positive transfer will occur.
That is why such an approach has the disadvantage of making the learner more subject to the influence of "false friends", words that seem similar between languages but differ significantly in meaning.
[11] Consciously, learners or unskilled translators may sometimes guess when producing speech or text in a second language because they have not learned or have forgotten its proper usage.
Such users could also be aware of both the structures and internal rules, yet be insufficiently skilled to put them into practice, and consequently often fall back on their first language.
Here, language determines how the speaker conceptualizes experience, with the principle describing the process as an unconscious assumption that is subject to between-language variation.
"[14] This is interpreted as a heuristic designed to make sense of the target language input by assuming a form of awareness on the part of the learner to map L1 onto the L2.
[18] It is a topic that has been gaining lots of interest from scholars due to the increasing number of bilingual and multilingual people, especially students, around the world.
In the USA alone, English Language Learners (ELL) account for over 10% of the students enrolled in public schools.
[21] Over time, through formal exposure and practice with literacy skills, L2 learners have been able to catch up with their monolingual peers.
Cross-language transfer can also occur with deaf bilinguals who use sign language and read written words.
According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders “ASL is a language completely separate and distinct from English.
In the English example, both word-order rules and the test of substituting a relative pronoun with different nominative and accusative case markings (e.g., whom/who*) reveal that only the woman can be doing the kissing.
The ambiguity of the German NNV relative clause structure becomes obvious in cases where the assignment of subject and object role is disambiguated.
Because in English relative clauses with a noun-noun-verb structure (as in the example above) the first noun can only be the object, native speakers of English who speak German as a second language are likelier to interpret ambiguous German NNV relative clauses as object relative clauses (= object-subject-verb order) than German native speakers who prefer an interpretation in which the first noun phrase is the subject (subject-object-verb order).
