Relationship Between Proficiency and Interference in Second Language

Bilingualism is viewed as alternative use of two languages in day-to-day context. Earlier views of bilingualism assumed the bilinguals to have equal proficiency in L1 as well as L2, while the recent views in bilingualism suggests that a bilingual can have competence to any degree in his/her second language. The competence factor is also called proficiency. In individuals who have limited proficiency, the domain language is believed to exert interference on the weaker language. Interference can be of two main types lexical interference and grammatical interference. Lexical interference is manifested through borrowing, while grammatical determined through incorrect subject-verb agreement and incorrect usage of PNG markers. The study aimed at determining the relationship between interference and proficiency levels on conversation, narration and picture description tasks. 40 participants were considered for the study, LEAP Q was administered on these participants and they were divided into high and low proficient speakers based on rating on LEAP Q. The results suggested that the interference was more for low proficiency group in regard to both grammatical as well as lexical interference. The amount of interference did not vary much with respect to the three different linguistic tasks.