Prominent Factors in the Acquisitionof Portuguese: Language Aptitude versus Previous Language Experience

The current study addresses the relationship that language aptitude and previous language experience have on third language acquisition. As McLaughlin and Nayak (1989) state, “There is considerable anecdotal evidence that once a person has learned a few languages, subsequent language learning is greatly facilitated” (p. 6). The task for language researchers is to investigate whether there is empirical evidence for this often-believed hypothesis. The difficulties in doing this abound, as there are many factors involved in language acquisition, whether it be the first, second, third, or fourth. Age of acquisition, motivation, language family, literacy, and socioeconomic status of the learner are a few of the many factors that need to be considered when studying how individuals acquire a new language. Political prestige of the language is also an important factor in language acquisition; if the political prestige of the language is low, the individual’s motivation to learn that language could also be low (Dornyei, Csizer & Nemeth, 2006). The concept of being bilingual is complex, and the literature on bilingualism uses approximately 37 terms to describe the various types of bilingualism. These terms range from balanced bilingual to describe someone whose two languages are roughly the same in terms of proficiency to incipient bilingual to describe someone who is just starting to learn a new language (Wei, 2001). For the purpose of this study, the term bilingual will be used to describe anyone who has experience with two or more languages, regardless of the proficiency level of the languages. Why would bilingualism have an effect on how subsequent languages are learned? Metalinguistic awareness has been shown to play a role in successful language acquisition. Ellis (1994) proposes the weak interface theory, stating that metalinguistic knowledge acts as an advanced organizer, thus, speeding up the language acquisition process. Several researchers, such as Bialystok (1986, 1987, 1991), Yelland, Pollard, and Mercury (1993), and Thomas (1988, 1992) show that bilinguals have a better understanding of metalanguage, i.e. explicit language information or the organization of language systems. This explicit knowledge speeds up the learning process of subsequent languages, and according to Thomas (1988 and 1992) helps bilingual learners to analyze language in a more structured system. Bialystok (2006) states, “It is plausible that having two different language systems for examination may make structural patterns more noticeable and hasten the child’s attention to the systematic features of the language” (p. 579-580). This idea is supported in Nayak et al (1990) when the multilingual participants outperformed the monolingual participants in learning the syntax of the artificial language presented. Although the multilingual participants did not outperform the monolingual participants in this study, “...there is some evidence to suggest that more experienced language learners show greater plasticity in restructuring their mental representations of the rules governing linguistic input” (p. 242). In other words, if a person has a concept of how more than one language is structured, he would be cognitively more receptive to accepting an additional language system into his repertoire. There have also been several empirical studies (McLaughlin & Nayak, 1989; Nation & McLaughlin, 1986; Nayak et al., 1990) that have suggested that when people learn an L2, the basic sub-skills of language learning are automated; thus, people with previous language experience have more resources to devote to the form of the new language. According to VanPatten (1996), controlled