Knowledge of previously acquired languages-besides other influencing factors such as social status, educational opportunities and intelligence-shapes the acquisition of other languages. The study does not support a general multilingual advantage that would result in an overall more target-like performance of the bilingual participants in comparison with the monolingual learners yet, individual benefits from the heritage languages could be revealed. The results point to the possibility of cross-linguistic influence from both previously acquired languages in third language acquisition, since production patterns could be identified that can be explained with transfer from the majority language German and the heritage languages Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese. We investigate the use of the progressive aspect in a written picture description task by 209 school-aged monolingual and bilingual learners of English. The aim of this paper is to look for differences between second language and third language acquisition and to assess the notion of multilingual advantages. Furthermore, no evidence was found to support the notion of a general multilingual advantage. The results show that there is CLI from all background languages visible in the English production of the bilingual participants however, differences between the L2 and 元 learners of English are very small which we understand as German exerting the largest influence. The areas of focus are the use of verb phrases including formal correctness and target-like meaning, and the use of the progressive aspect.
![different numbers in different languages different numbers in different languages](http://bangkok-papatchaya.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/5/6/37563321/6759239.gif)
![different numbers in different languages different numbers in different languages](https://www.istanbullife.org/cappadocia/mainpage/cappadocia_balloon1.jpg)
We test this on the basis of a learner corpus including texts written by bilingual Russian-German, monolingual German, and monolingual Russian students at the age of 12 and 16 who learn English as a foreign language at school. In addition, bilinguals are sometimes said to have an advantage over monolinguals in acquiring further foreign languages (see for example Cenoz 2003 Jessner 2008). Several contrasting models provide an ambiguous picture as to which of the previously learned language(s) acts as the source of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in 元 acquisition. This study compares third language (元) acquisition of bilingual heritage speakers and second language (L2) acquisition of monolingual speakers. Knowledge of previously acquired languages-besides other influencing factors such as social status, educational opportunities, and intelligence-shapes the acquisition of other languages. The results point to the possibility of cross-linguistic influence from both previously acquired languages in third language acquisition, since production patterns could be identified that can be explained with transfer from the majority language German and the heritage languages Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
![different numbers in different languages different numbers in different languages](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/images/t3-japanese-relative-time-periods.png)