Cognitive economy, non-redundancy and typological primacy in L3 acquisition

This chapter has two main objectives. The first is to critically introduce the reader to the emerging field of generative third language acquisition, demonstrating that L3 data make significant contributions towards a better understanding of how the mind represents language and how cognitive economy delimits acquisition processes. The second is to offer an updated articulation of the Typological Primacy Model (Rothman 2010, 2011), which argues that structural proximity between the L3 and the L1 and/or the L2 determines L3 initial stages transfer. Beyond showing this with empirical data, a proposal of how the mind determines typological proximity and how this is motivated by cognitive and linguistic factors is fleshed out.