Cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition: Sentence processing and comprehension by child heritage bilinguals (TomRis) - MSCA (2023- 2025)

The mechanisms underlying how a child heritage speaker’s brain processes and comprehends a third language during reading remain largely unexplored. The challenge lies in understanding how the prior languages a child has learned, particularly those that are typologically close or distant from the third language, impact their ability to read and understand sentences in this new linguistic context. TomRis will innovatively apply an eye-tracking method with an embedded behavioural elicitation task as a measure of processing and comprehension to investigate the real-time course of cross-linguistic influence from each background language. It will focus on the structures that show a (mis)match between L1 heritage (Turkish), L2 (Norwegian/Duch) and L3 English to explore whether (mis)matched morpho-syntactic properties of prior languages hinder or facilitate the processing of a third language, English.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)