Editing Language transfer (section)

==In comprehension==

Transfer can also occur in [[Polyglot (person)|polyglot]] individuals when comprehending verbal utterances or written language. For instance, [[German language|German]] and [[English language|English]] both have [[relative clause]]s with a [[noun]]-noun-[[verb]] (=NNV) order but which are interpreted differently in both languages:

German example: ''Das Mädchen, das die Frau küsst, ist blond''

If [[Translation|translated]] word for word with word order maintained, this German relative clause is equivalent to

English example: ''The girl that ''(or ''whom'')'' the woman is kissing is blonde.''

The German and the English examples differ in that in German the [[Subject (grammar)|subject]] role can be taken by ''das Mädchen'' (the girl) or ''die Frau'' (the woman) while in the English example only the second [[noun phrase]] (the woman) can be the subject. In short, because German singular feminine and neuter articles exhibit the same inflected form for the accusative as for the nominative case, the German example is [[syntactic ambiguity|syntactically ambiguous]] in that either ''the girl'' or ''the woman'' may be doing the kissing. In the English example, both word-order rules and the test of substituting a relative pronoun with different nominative and accusative case markings (''e.g.'', ''whom''/''who''*) reveal that only ''the woman'' can be doing the kissing.

The ambiguity of the German NNV relative clause structure becomes obvious in cases where the assignment of [[Subject (grammar)|subject]] and [[Object (grammar)|object]] role is disambiguated. This can be because of [[case marking]] if one of the nouns is [[Grammatical gender|grammatically male]] as in ''Der Mann, den die Frau küsst...'' (The man that the woman is kissing...) vs. ''Der Mann, der die Frau küsst'' (The man that is kissing the woman...) because in German the male [[Definite article#Definite article|definite article]] marks the [[accusative]] [[Grammatical case|case]]. The syntactic ambiguity of the German example also becomes obvious in the case of [[Polysemy|semantic disambiguation]]. For instance in ''Das Eis, das die Frau isst...'' (The ice cream that the woman is eating...) and ''Die Frau, die das Eis isst...'' (The woman that is eating the ice cream...) only ''die Frau'' (the woman) is a plausible subject.

Because in English relative clauses with a noun-noun-verb structure (as in the example above) the first noun can only be the [[Object (grammar)|object]], [[First language|native speakers]] of English who speak German as a [[second language]] are likelier to interpret ambiguous German NNV relative clauses as object relative clauses (= object-subject-verb order) than German native speakers who prefer an interpretation in which the first noun phrase is the subject (subject-object-verb order).<ref>{{Harvnb|Nitschke|Kidd|Serratrice|2010}}.</ref> This is because they have transferred their [[parsing]] preference from their first language English to their second language German.