ABSTRACT

One of the most important developments in the history of transfer research was the shift of attention from transfer to transferability. This was a shift from the documentation of cases of transfer to the more fundamental investigation of what makes something likely to be transferred in the first place. Studies by Jordens (1977), Kellerman (1977, 1978), Ringbom (1978a, 1978b) and others were instrumental in leading the field to this new perspective, and the insights of these studies were later synthesized by Kellerman (1983) into two general constraints that govern the occurrence of language transfer: psychotypology and transferability. The essence of the psychotypology constraint is that transfer is more likely to occur when the L2 user perceives the L1 and L2 as being similar, whereas the essence of the transferability constraint is that structures perceived by the L2 user as marked (or language-specific) are less likely to transfer.