چکیده:
In surveys of third language acquisition (TLA) research, mixed results demonstrate that there is
no consensus among researchers regarding the advantages and/or disadvantages of bilinguality
on TLA. The main concern of the present study was, thus, to probe the probable differences
between Persian monolingual and Azeri-Persian bilingual learners of English regarding their
syntactic knowledge. It was an attempt to investigate whether they differ significantly in
learning relative clauses. To carry out this study, a total of 200 female high school students
studying at second grade were randomly selected from two educational districts of Tabriz and
Shiraz in Iran. The participants were homogeneous in terms of English proficiency, sex, and
age. They attended public high schools; they were taught the same materials and had the same
number of hours of instruction. A general proficiency test, a language history questionnaire,
and two syntactic structure tasks were administered to both groups. Statistical analyses
including t-tests and descriptive statistics revealed that monolinguals and bilinguals differ in
the comprehension and production of English L3 relative clauses.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The main concern of the present study was, thus, to probe the probable differences between Persian monolingual and Azeri-Persian bilingual learners of English regarding their syntactic knowledge.
The results of the data analyses showed that: Native speakers of Turkish and Armenian who speak Persian as their second language performed better in the English vocabulary test than the Persian monolingual learners of English.
Employing an experimental, within-group design, Talebinezhad and Mehrabi (2007) studied three languages, Persian as the mother tongue of the participants, English as the second language they learned at high school, and German as their third language to "explore the manner in which word forms are connected to the other words in the multilingual minds…check the claim made by many first language researchers that multilingual people's first languages play a privileged role in the acquisition of subsequent languages" (p.
Nevertheless, it can be concluded that having a second language has an effect on the acquisition of English L3 relative clauses by bilingual learners.
The findings are supported by other studies which have demonstrated that bilingualism results in more efficient foreign language learning (Ringbom, 1987; Thomas, 1988; Klein, 1995; Sanz, 2000; Hoffman, 2001; Keshavarz & Astaneh, 2004; Modirkhamene, 2008; Jaensch, 2009; Dibaj, 2011; Kassaian & Esmae’li, 2011; Seifi & Abdolmanafi, 2013; Saeidi & Mazoochi, 2013; and Zare & Mobarakeh, 2013).
Zobl (as cited in Falk & Bardel, 2010) used a grammaticality judgment test to measure several structures by monolingual and multilingual learners of English.