Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is a generic term for different ways in which different language systems in the mind interact and affect either the linguistic performance or the linguistic development (or both) of the individual concerned (Sharwood Smith 1983). This typically refers two different languages, for example the influence of Korean or a Korean native speaker who is learning Japanese, or French although it might, logically but much less typically, be used to refer to an interaction between different dialects or varieties of one language in the mind of a monolingual speaker, for example.

Transfer

Subcategories of CLI include language transfer. Transfer is a term originally borrowed into second language acquisition

Second language acquisition

Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...

 studies from behaviorist psychology and was first used to describe the positive and negative effects of old language habits affecting new ones. In the former case, similarities between languages was said to facilitate learning, In the latter case, one set of entrenched language habits imposed themselves on the developing language and caused non-native forms (errors) to occur: the result was called negative transfer, also termed ‘interference, a foreign accent being a typical example of this (Lado 1957). Eventually transfer lost its association with behaviourism and was adopted as a common term irrespective of any theoretical allegiance.

Transfer in reverse

Although transfer is regularly associated with second language acquisition, another type of CLI might be called transfer in the reverse direction, that is, the influence of a new language on a previously established one. Typically this phenomenon is associated with language attrition when speakers of one language lose regular contact with speakers of their own language and use a second language instead, that is, the language of the speech community in which they now live. In this case, people speak, informally, of ‘language loss’ or ’forgetting their own language’. This kind of CLI can also be refer to the situation where a later learned language, say a third language, influences the use of an earlier learned non-native second language.

Avoidance

Crosslinguistic influence may also manifest itself in avoidance behaviour where, for instance, a second language is perceived by the learner to be distant from the native language so that possible correspondences between the two system envisaged by the language learner are simply not trusted. This way in which learners perceive differences and similarities between languages (say Chinese and Japanese as compared with Chinese and Hungarian) and let this affect what they are willing to ‘transfer' or ‘borrow’ words and constructions has been called psychotypology (Kellerman 1979). Such avoidance behavior was first documented experimentally by Schachter in a study of Persian-speaking learners of English (Schachter 1974).

Further reading

• Odlin, T. (2003) Cross-linguistic influence. In C. Doughty and M. Long (eds.) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 436-486). Oxford: Blackwell.
• Sharwood Smith, M. and Kellerman, E. 1986. “Crosslinguistic influence in second language: an introduction”. In Crosslinguistic Influence in Second Language Acquisition, E. Kellerman and M. Sharwood Smith (eds), 1-9. Oxford: Pergamon.