How do L3 words find conceptual parasitic hosts in typologically distant L1 or L2? Evidence from a cross-linguistic priming effect

ABSTRACT

The parasitic model proposes that novel words in L3 learning will build parasitic connections to already learned words that share orthographic or phonological similarities. This accounts for little in terms of the connections between words that share very few similarities. The present study explored the parasitic connections of L3 word concepts to learned typologically distant languages. Tibetan L1 learners of English L3 with different levels of L2 Chinese proficiency from a Chinese Tibetan middle school participated in a series of experiments based on a cross-linguistic repetition priming paradigm to investigate the L3 word concept connections to the two learned languages. The results showed that the L3 words took the nearest translation equivalents in L2 words as the first and sole parasitic hosts when the L2 was at a high proficiency level, but when the L2 was at a low proficiency level, both L1 and L2 were selected.

KEYWORDS:

• The parasitic model
• cross-linguistic repetition priming
• trilinguals
• conceptual parasitic hosts
• L2 proficiency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Jianlin Chen is associate professor in Lanzhou University, China. He got PhD degree of Linguistics in K. U. Leuven, Belgium and PhD degree of Arts in Shanghai International Studies University, China. His research interests include second and third language acquisition in a bilingual or a multilingual context, psycholinguistics and foreign language teaching and assessment. He is currently investigating third language acquisition of students in China’s ethnic minority areas. He got projects funded by China’s National Social Science Foundation and funds from China’s Ministry of Education. He has published articles in international journals and key Chinese journals as well.

Notes

1 Many studies used the self assessment method and have proved it to be a relatively reliable means in comparing one’s two or more languages’ proficiency (e.g. Aparicio and Lavaur 2015; Li et al. 2009; Li et al. 2016).

2 This terminology is used for transparency, with ‘HIGH-L2’ stands for participants of high L2 proficiency, and E-T means that the priming language is English and the target language is Tibetan.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China’s National Social Science Foundation [grant number 16BYY085].