Learners' Implicit Assumptions About Syntactic Frames in New L3 Words: The Role of Cognates, Typological Proximity, and L2 Status

Learners of third language (L3) German and L3 French studied unfamiliar verbs that were cognate with first language (L1) Spanish equivalents, second language (L2) English equivalents, or neither. We examined whether learners would assume that the verbs shared syntactic frames with cognate forms in the typologically closer language. In immediate tests, verbs were preferentially judged grammatical in cognate frames, with verbs in typologically closer French yielding a stronger effect for Spanish frames than German verbs did for English frames. After a week, the effect had disappeared for German but was maintained for French. Noncognates were judged more grammatical in the L2 frame in both experiments. The results suggest that form similarity, typological proximity, and L2 status can jointly affect preliminary assumptions about new words' grammatical properties.