Interlanguage correspondences and their manifestation in receptive bilinguals

Abstract

The current paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis of speech errors made during the L2 picture-naming task in the context of two mutually intelligible languages. The task was performed by native speakers of Slovak and its target language was Czech. The errors demonstrate that production is partly based on the so-called interlanguage analogies and interiorized rules derived from them. Such issues have been rather overlooked in the previous literature. Our qualitative findings offer a viable starting point for formulating novel hypotheses for quantitative studies on lexical access in bilinguals. The evidence discussed here shows that examining less commonly studied languages in their specific contexts can substantially enrich the research that has traditionally focused on better studied languages, such as English, French, German or Dutch.