journal of linguistic studies

3.2. INTRA-LINGUAL INTERFERENCE
Intra-lingual interference comes from the target language itself. When a learner has
already known some grammar rules about that language, some knowledge learned earlier
will have certain effects on his further study.
For example: *She buyed an ice-cream.
Here, the speaker has already understood the past tense and verbal inflection in
English, but he follows the general way to add “ed” to the verb “buy”. It is an example of
misusing suffixes.
3.3. NON-LINGUISTIC INTERFERENCE
Psychological factors and the objective environment can also lend itself to make
errors.
For example: Lucy told his mother a lie. It is possible that the storyteller was so
shy, anxious, nervous, etc. that she commits such an error.
3.4. CULTURAL INTERFERENCE
The cultural background of one’s mother tongue will exert a certain effect on his
second language acquisition.
Say, in South Korea, it is common to greet somebody with the followings: “Where
are you going?” or “Have you eaten?” But they are unacceptable in western countries.
It is firmly believed that, according to psycholinguistics transfer theory, when
learning a target language, one’s mother tongue can inevitably have a certain influence on
it. This kind of influence is called “transfer”. “Transfer” may be either positive or
negative. “Positive transfer” could promote language acquisition accordingly, while
“negative transfer” will prevent him from making progress. But under certain conditions,
“negative transfer” could be transformed. Errors originate from the process of “negative
transfer”, if the learner could correct his errors in time, and then this “negative transfer”
will be also helpful to his language acquisition. “Language transfer” is rather
unconscious. Whereupon, most learners will unconsciously understand, explain; even
appraise the target language in his usual way, which is defined “pragmatic transfer”. The
errors produced in this stage are inter-lingual interference or cultural interference, which
are severer than intra-lingual interference. Intra-lingual interference result in some errors
which usually will not break down the communication. The speaker committing such
errors will leave an impression that he is not good at grammar, but if he has produced
errors owing to inter-lingual interference or cultural interference, he will be considered
being uneducated, offensive, even legally reprehensible.
For the cases regarding inter-lingual interference or cultural interference, we know it
is grammar rules, language knowledge or study experience of one’s own mother tongue
that have impact on second language acquisition. So in the teaching, we could ask the
students to compare the two languages in details, such as sentence structure, expressive
function, etc; help them to discriminate the pragmatic meanings of different sentence
patterns; guide them to unique cultural background of the target language. We should
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