Date:  Tue, 15 Mar 1994 21:45:39 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike <RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET>

Subject: Re: Conscious Learning of Accent



In response to Dennis Preston's query re interaction of L2 and L3 etc,

I have never seen anything formal published on it, though it is a fascinating

issue in regard to the question of neural storage and access. The first and

only formal comment on it I heard was by the British linguist W. Stannard

Allen who gave a lecture in Istanbul in 1960 (reported to me), in which he

speculated that some people had two language "channels", one for L1 and the

other for L2...Ln. I've used this for years in lectures on bilingualism,

with anecdotes from my own and others' experiences. Allen qualified his

comment by indicating that the "Channel 2" applied to languages that the

speaker did not know well. I thought I had commented on the phenomenon on

ADS-L sometime back when discussing code-switching, but maybe I had just done

it in e-mailing Don Lance.

    I seem to have 3 channels, one for English, one for Spanish, and one

for Lx, where the latter involves any language I don't know well. When I

lived in Turkey and traveled to Germany for summer vacation, I used to spend

the time going through Yugoslavia suppressing my Turkish and reviving my

German (both equally poor), and the reverse on the way back. Once, having

arrived in Austria, I encountered a man who saw my Turkish license plates and

asked in Turkish how long it had taken to get there; though I understood his

question perfectly, I could only answer in German. Years later, when I

started to study Chinese [I always recommend that anyone involved with L2

teaching should go through the process of learning another language every

5 years or so, to remember what it is like to be a student again], I was the

only person in the class who produced sentences in SOV order (Turkish is SOV,

but Chinese, like English, is predominantly SVO, so there should have been

no interference). When I took Korean lessons 5 years ago (it's time to start

another one -- the next will be ASL), I mainly had lexical interference from

Chinese, but that was because of the large number of Chinese loans, most of

which are pronounced markedly differently in Korean. I can't claim to have

achieved any real fluency in Korean, unfortunately.

    Anybody have any more anecdotes?

--Rudy Troike (rtroike[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ccit.arizona.edu)