چكيده لاتين :
Recently, the number of trilinguals and multilinguals is
rapidly increasing but most of the studies of cross-linguistic
influences have concentrated only on the effect of LIon L2
and not on the effects of L1 and/or L2 on the acquisition of
a third language (i.e. L3). This research tried to concentrate
on this aspect and specially focused on the acquisition of
negation in English as an L3 by Turkish-Persian bilinguals.The reason for choosing negation was that many learners
find syntactic negation problematic and different languages
put their negative particles in different positions in the
sentence. For the purpose of this paper, the three languages were
compared, and predictions were made on the basis of these
comparisons. 40 participants (20 adults and 20 children)
chosen by stratified random sampling took part in written
and oral production tests, and then they were divided into
two halves on the basis of their proficiency levels
(elementary and advanced). The written test consisted of 30
questions, and the interviews included a number of
questions eliciting negative productions, and each one
lasted for about 15 minutes. Incorrect negative utterances extracted from the tests/interviews were analyzed and compared, and then
predictions were made following Contrastive Analysis (CA) guidelines. The researchers came to two important conclusions: first, interference or negative transfer was not the only source of errors, and CA predictions should not be completely trusted. Second, L2 (here, Persian) was more dominant and effective in the participantsי productions of
negations in L3 (here, English).
