Lähdekielen vaikutus ja kielitaitotasot: paikallissijojen kehitys oppijansuomessa
L1 influence and CEFR levels: On the development of the use of Finnish local cases

Summary/Abstract: This article is an investigation of the ffect of L1 influence in the development of learner Finnish. The study concentrates on the development of the use of Finnish local cases by L1 Estonian and L1 multi-language background learners. Written data is collected from the L1 Estonian subcorpus of International Corpus of Learner Finnish – ICLFI, 86 178 tokens in total. To identify the e0ect of positive transfer ICLFI data is compared to the results of Sanna Mustonen’s study (Martin et al. 2010: 64–67) on the development of the use of Finnish local cases in the Ce6ing Project. Comparison data consists of writing samples totalling 53 019 words produced by adult non-native speakers of Finnish from over 20 L1 backgrounds. 8is corpus is a collection of Finnish National Proficiency Certificate exams. All texts from both corpora have been independently rated to be at a given CEFR level. In a cross-corpora comparison, the development of the use of Finnish local cases is analyzed by means of frequency, accuracy, distribution and conceptual semantics. Finnish local cases emerge from early stages on in both corpora. The use of spatial expressions declines and the use of circumstantial expressions rises when the learners’ proficiency level rises. Results show that despite the differences in the use of local cases in Estonian and Finnish, learners with a closely related L1 exhibit native-like performance by the means of frequency and accuracy in earlier stages than those learners of other language backgrounds. The development of accuracy shows that L1 Estonian learners achieve at least 89% accuracy in their use of local cases already at the level A2. The underlying objective similarities make it possible for learners to assume and perceive similarity across these languages.

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