Research Findings

1. First language influence appears to be strongest in complex word order and in word-for-word translations of phrases.

Evidence for this generalization comes from several sources. Duskova (1969), for example, studied written errors in the compositions of Czech "postgraduate students" and concluded that "interference from the mother tongue... was plainly obvious in errors of word order and sentence construction" (p.18), a common example being the placement of the direct object after an adverbial, as in

                    I met there some Germans.

Also present in the compositions were many word-for-word translations of Czech expressions into English, such as "another my friend" instead of "another friend of mine".

LoCoco (1975), in a study of American college students learning Spanish and German in the US, a foreign language situation, reported that the "high incidence of interlingual (L1 interference) errors in German was due to word order errors..." (p. 101). Typical examples include

                    Hoffentlich du bist gesund
                    Hopefully you are healthy
correct:            Hoffentlich bist du gesund

and

                    Ich bin glücklich sein hier
                    I am happy to be here
correct:            Ich bin glücklich hier zu sein.

First language-based errors in Spanish were less numerous and "pertained primarily to adjective position". The greater word order differences between English and German as compared to English and Spanish accounts for the differences in frequencies in interference word order errors. Spanish students were more often correct in using English surface structures in utterance initiation due to the greater surface similarity between English and Spanish. This also accounts for Chan's (1975) finding that English to Spanish interference errors

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