Investigating the Reverse Transfer From L3 Spanish, French, and Italian to L2 English in Tense and Aspect: A Study of L1 Mandarin Chinese Speakers

This study investigates whether the knowledge of two perfective distinctions (current relevance vs. simple past completion) that learners have acquired from their L3 leads to reverse transfer, observable in their comprehension of the corresponding L2 English forms (present perfect and simple past). We analyze the manifestations of this transfer across three levels: formal, semantic, and conceptual. The participants consist of 50 L1 Mandarin Chinese learners specializing in Spanish ( N = 17), French ( N = 18), or Italian ( N = 15) as their L3 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; B2), all of whom share English as their L2 (B2). A translation appropriateness assessment was administered to evaluate learners’ L2 English renditions of sentences presented in their respective L3s. Results indicate that reverse transfer occurred across all three linguistic levels (formal, semantic, and conceptual), with conceptual transfer manifesting more prominently than morphological transfer in the learners’ English translations. Furthermore, transfer across these different levels is not solely determined by static multilingual knowledge but rather operates as a dynamic process influenced by contextual cues and ongoing language analysis and processing by multilingual speakers.