Crosslinguistic Influence and Second Language Learning

Abstract

The multilingual turn in second language acquisition (SLA) research signals an epistemic reorientation of the field (Ortega, 2014). It manifests the move away from the monolingual bias that measures learner language with the idealized competence of native speakers as the yardstick. In so doing, the focus has shifted to disentangling the cognitive, linguistic, and psycholinguistic mechanisms involved in multilinguals’ language acquisition processes. Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) has been a prominent object of research since the 1980s, and new perspectives have been requested to reflect this multilingual turn (Odlin & Yu, 2016). McManus’s (2022) book, Crosslinguistic influence and second language learning, aims to advance new avenues of theorization and empirical research in CLI to answer the multilingual turn’s call.