This presentation outlines results from a study on the difference between intentional lexical transfer (produced with awareness, on purpose) and unintentional lexical transfer (produced without awareness, accidentally). It will be shown that crosslinguistic morphological similarity and morphological (cross)linguistic awareness are the most important factors of (un)intentionality in lexical transfer.
Traditionally, linguistic transfer is conceptualised as an unintentional mechanism of 'interference', and the mainstream view of transfer in the current models of the multilingual mental lexicon is also that transfer occurs unintentionally or automatically, due to high levels of cross-lexical co-activation. The perception of control in transfer is changing, however, and it is becoming increasingly accepted that transfer can also be produced intentionally. This view of transfer as an intentional mechanism is reflected, on the one hand, in transfer accounts, which note that transfer may also be produced 'intentionally' (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008) or as a 'conscious strategy' (Herdina & Jessner, 2002) and, on the other hand, in the proposal of 'pedagogical translanguaging' (Cenoz & Gorter, e.g., 2017, 2020), according to which teachers should raise learners' awareness of similarities between their background languages and the target language in order to help them find opportunities to use features from their languages (i.e., transfer) as a 'resource'. Despite these theoretical advancements, however, very little is known from an empirical perspective on the difference between unintentional and intentional transfer. In the present study, intro- and retrospective tasks were used with 78 highly multilingual school students of L3 Spanish to distinguish between instances of transfer that were produced intentionally (with awareness, on purpose) and instances of transfer that occurred unintentionally (without awareness, accidentally). A quasi-Poisson regression analysis was employed to test the association of potentially important variables with (un)intentionality in lexical transfer. A qualitative analysis was moreover conducted at the word-specific level to explore how the different types of lexical transfer were manifested depending on whether they were produced intentionally or unintentionally. The results suggest that cross-linguistic morphological similarity and linguistic awareness are the most important factors on learners' amounts of unintentional transfer and intentional transfer.
