On February 1, Professor Scott Jarvis (Ohio University) held an open guest lecture at MultiLing on cross-linguistic influence and meaning transfer.
Cross-linguistic influence and conceptual transfer
How do speakers of different L1s represent meaning, and what levels of mental representation do these originate from? Professor of linguistics Scott Jarvis is well-associated with the study of cross-linguistic influence (CLI), that is, crosslinguistic influence involving meaning, and how this is related to conceptual and semantic transfer at the level of the speaker. The lecture was focused on how we need to separate these two types of transfer that constitute meaning transfer, and also on what we should concern ourselves with in terms of the methods used in this type of research.
Conceptual transfer is the bridging between traditional CLI and linguistic relativity, and Jarvis was particularly devoted to demonstrating how, when, and where CLI occurs in speakers' expressions. His examples were among others from Finnish and Swedish L1 speakers, who showed different tendencies when describing certain situations in English, something that is thought to reflect their conceptual transfer from their respective L1s, so-called conceptual effects. When the research participants were shown an image of a person sitting on a lawn or a patch of grass, they would either use the preposition "in" or "on" to describe what the person was sitting on. Swedish speakers had a tendency to use "in" more than Finnish speakers, and Finnish speakers used "on" more than the Swedish speakers. The length of the grass would also come into play, with "in" conceptualized as better describing persons sitting in taller grass than "on".
The methodology of conceptual transfer
Jarvis identified three important points in the research on conceptual transfer, that alle have different methological approaches: 1) In order to study how different conceptual meanings are expressed by different language learners, we must assess their representations in long and short-term memory. This can be done through a study of the segmentation, selection, and structuring of elemtents of meaning in verbalization. 2) When dealing with question of whether learners with different language backgrounds have different conceptual meanings in mind when performing the same task, Jarvis suggests verbal evidence in the form of different memory tasks as beneficial, among other things assessing perception and categorization. 3) The last point concerns how learners' patterns of CLI are supported by their patterns of nonverbal behavior. These are also tasks involving among other thingsperception and categorization.
For further reference, please see Jarvis's article on CLI and conceptual transfer (external link).