language interference
Because the two languages a bilingual person learns are interconnected, learners often transfer what they know about one language to the other. (See language interdependence .) Often this works well because languages do have many similarities in how they function. But when the languages are different in a particular feature, this strategy of transferring causes errors and sometimes significant misunderstanding on the part of the learner. This is known as language interference, because the knowledge about the first language ‘interferes’ with the learning of the second.
