Background to the Trilingual Study

Part 2, consisting of Chapters 3-6, presents a trilingual study of lexical inferencing in readers’ native language and a second language (L2) (English) by young adult speakers of Persian and French, two Indo-European languages with distant and close typological relationships to English, the common L2. A first objective is to identify procedures that are shared across languages in both first language (L1) and L2 lexical inferencing, as well as overall differences between L1 and L2 lexical inferencing. The main focus, thereafter, is identification of L1 influences in L2 lexical inferencing. This is achieved through comparative analyses of L1-L2 conditions for the Persian and French speakers, across the three L1s, and across the English L1 and L2 conditions. Particular attention is given to the possible role of typological distance between readers’ L1 and L2 as this interacts with their lexical knowledge in lexical inferencing procedures and outcomes.

The primary objective of the trilingual study was to seek a better understanding of the processes and outcomes of L2 (English) lexical inferencing from written texts as influenced by readers’ native language knowledge. Our goal is to understand the conditions that promote successful word comprehension through lexical inferencing by L2 readers, and related to this, the conditions that lead to their retention of new knowledge of word meanings following inferencing. Learners’ previous L2 lexical knowledge is known to be a major factor in inferencing success and retention (Chapter 1). Another factor that has received little attention to date is what learners bring to the task in terms of relevant L1 linguistic knowledge.