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Article published In: Beyond Corpus Data — Complementary and Alternative Methods in Cognitive Linguistics
Edited by Anton Granvik, Veera Hatakka, Olli O. Silvennoinen, Riku Erkkilä and Eveliina Mäntylä
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 23:2] 2025
► pp. 573–595

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Regular article

The semantic access mechanism of L3 Spanish words

Evidence from a cross-linguistic priming effect by Chinese native speakers

 | Macau University of Science and Technology
 | Macau University of Science and Technology
Published online: 23 January 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00175.wan
Abstract
This study investigates the lexical semantic access mode among students (n = 70) who speak Chinese as their first language (L1), English as a second language (L2), and are in the process of learning Spanish as their third language (L3). We use a cross-linguistic repetition priming paradigm with lexical decision tasks to assess whether semantic access to L3 Spanish words is achieved with the help of L1 Chinese or L2 English translation equivalents. The results show that the lexical semantic access mode varies depending on L3 proficiency level: Participants with high Spanish proficiency level have direct access to the concepts, while nonproficient Spanish learners have access to the Spanish words’ conceptual representation with the help of translation equivalents from both L1 Chinese and L2 English, which suggests that the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory & Language, 33(2), 149–174. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) in second language acquisition (SLA) can be extended to the third language acquisition (TLA) process. Our results also corroborate the Parasitic Model (Ecke, P. (2015). Parasitic vocabulary acquisition, cross-linguistic influence, and lexical retrieval in multilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(2), 145–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), as trilingual speakers are shown to be dependent on previously acquired languages at the initial stage.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The role of L1 and L2 in L3 acquisition
    • 2.2Cross-linguistic influence and L3 lexical acquisition
  • 3.Methods and materials
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Design
    • 3.3Stimuli
    • 3.4Procedure
      • 3.4.1HIGH L3 group: Experiment 1
      • 3.4.2LOW L3 group: Experiment 2
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Experiment 1a CHN and 1b ENG
    • 4.2Experiment 2a CHN and 2b ENG
  • 5.General discussion
    • 5.1Semantic access mechanism for high proficiency in Spanish as L3
    • 5.2Semantic access mechanism for low proficiency in Spanish as L3
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (56)
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