Language Transfer - Language Transfer in Comprehension

Language Transfer in Comprehension

Transfer can also occur in polyglot individuals when comprehending verbal utterances or written language. For instance, German and English both have relative clauses with a noun-noun-verb (=NNV) order but which are interpreted differently in both languages:

German example: Das Mädchen, das die Frau küsst, ist blond

Word by word this German relative clause translates to

English example: The girl that the woman is kissing is blonde.

The German and the English examples differ in that in German the subject role can be taken by das Mädchen (the girl) or die Frau (the woman) while in the English example only the second noun phrase (the woman) can be the subject. In short: The German example is syntactically ambiguous because it can be the girl or the woman who does the kissing. In the English example it can only be the woman who does the kissing.

The ambiguity of the German NNV relative clause structure becomes obvious in cases where the assignment of subject and object role is disambiguated. This can be because of case marking if one of the nouns is grammatically male as in Der Mann, den die Frau küsst… (The man that the woman is kissing…) vs. Der Mann, der die Frau küsst (The man that is kissing the woman) because in German the male definite article marks the accusative case. The syntactic ambiguity of the German example also becomes obvious in the case of semantic disambiguation. For instance in Das Eis, das die Frau isst… and Die Frau, die das Eis isst… (both: The woman that is eating the ice cream) only das Eis (ice cream) is a plausible object.

Because in English relative clauses with a noun-noun-verb structure (as in the example above) the first noun can only be the object, native speakers of English who speak German as a second language are more likely to interpret ambiguous German NNV relative clauses as object relative clauses (= object-subject-verb order) than German native speakers who prefer an interpretation in which the first noun phrase is the subject (subject-object-verb order). This is because they have transferred their parsing preference from their first language English to their second language German.