Introduction

The study of crosslinguistic influence or language transfer has generated much intense interest in the field of Second Language Acquisition (L2A) for a few decades (see Andersen, 1983; Gass & Selinker, 1983, 1992; Kellerman, 1979, 1983; Odlin, 1989, 2003, amongst others). The last couple of years have seen the line of inquiry branching out into the young field of third language acquisition (L3A). Researchers working on L3A seriously attempt to find out the source of transfer in cases of additional non-native/non-primary or multilingual language acquisition by investigating various potential (confounding) factors, such as second language (L2)/third language (L3) proficiency (Dewaele, 2001; Hammarberg, 2001; Williams & Hammarberg, 1998), the privileged status of the first language (L1) (De Angelis & Selinker, 2001), age effects (Cenoz, 2001), typological proximity between languages (Cenoz, 2001; De Angelis & Selinker, 2001; Ecke, 2001; Hammarberg, 2001; Ringbom, 2001; Williams & Hammarberg, 1998), psychotypology (Bouvy, 2000; Kellerman, 1979, 1983), as well as recency effect (Hammarberg, 2001; Williams & Hammarberg, 1998). However, most of the L3 studies focused primarily on lexical transfer (see Cenoz & Jessner, 2000; see also studies in Cenoz et al., 2001, 2003, amongst others); indeed most research in the field of L3A is descriptive in nature and seldom extends beyond the domain of the lexicon (see Leung, 2007 for a review).

Contrary to common misconceptions, despite embracing universalist assumptions questing for ‘sameness’, L2A researchers working from the Universal Grammar (UG) perspective have not ignored the relevance of language transfer in the study of L2 acquisition (cf. review in Odlin, 2003).