L3/Ln acquisition

This paper approaches the research questions in current L3 acquisition research from the point of view of the current debates in L2A. We consider published L3 acquisition data to see whether four current hypotheses: the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, the Interface Hypothesis, the Bottleneck Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis can give us explanations of the linguistic processes of multilingualism. As an answer to the question “what transfers in L3A?”, the Modular Transfer Hypothesis is proposed, arguing that what transfers is essentially dependent on the intrinsic difficulty of the linguistic property. It is demonstrated that difficulty depends both on morphology and/or meaning mismatches between the L1, L2 and L3, as well as on the frequency of the available evidence for the property to be acquired.