| The present study investigates bilinguals learning L3. The Korean and Chinese subjects, who are bilinguals in their native language and English and who are learning Japanese as L3, are compared with Americans studying Japanese as L2 at Michigan State University. There are nineteen Asians and twenty Americans as subjects who are chosen from Japanese first and second-year levels. Negative questions and some phrases in Japanese which contrast in word order in English are selected as the items for the tests. The main questions were the existence of L2 transfer into L3 and a question: does bilingualism have any impact on an individual's L3 learning? The results between two levels and two contexts, conversation and reading, are compared. It was found that the recognizable number of errors reflect the transfer from L2, English, into L3, Japanese. The paper points out one of the possible areas where multilingualism works disadvantageously. |
