In this study, we examined to what extent cross-linguistic influence is observed in the production of unstressed vowels in Mexican learners of L2 English and L3 Russian. Phonological spectral vowel reduction is a widespread process present in both English and Russian, but not in Spanish. In total, 18 Mexican learners, six American speakers, five Russian speakers and six Mexican speakers performed a delayed word repetition task and a sentence completion task. Euclidean distances and temporal values were measured to assess vowel reduction in 1,192 tokens. Mexican learners showed hybrid values of vowel reduction in both foreign languages: while they tended to use quality cues in the case of the L2, they relied on duration cues in the case of the L3. Our results do not show any direct evidence of cross-linguistic influence of temporal values or vowel quality from the L1 or the L2 on the L3. We examine these findings in light of similar studies and current L3 acquisition models.

The present study explored whether emergent bilingual children showed enhanced abilities to learn L3 vocabulary including written, spoken and conceptual forms compared to monolinguals, and the impact of L2/L3 cross-language similarities on such an effect. To this end, we contrasted the English word learning performance of French fifth-graders attending either a monolingual school program or a classroom-immersion program with German as an L2. Half of the items to be learned were German/English (L2/L3) cognate words while the other half were monolingual English (L3) words. Learning was assessed with a forced-choice recognition task, a go/no-go auditive recognition task and an orthographic judgment task. Results yielded a generalized bilingual advantage, with classroom-immersion children outperforming monolinguals on all tasks, irrespective of cognateness, except for the orthographic task. These findings advocate for a bilingual advantage in children that is globally not driven by the specific language properties of cognates, except for the written modality.

The present study follows the role of the first (L1, English) and second (L2, Japanese or Spanish) languages in ab initio third language (L3, Latin) acquisition. Participants (N = 25) were L2 classroom learners without immersion experience. In order to complement previous generativist studies and to offer a fuller developmental account of how transfer operates at the morphosyntactic level, the Competition Model (CM) was adopted as theoretical framework. Positive changes in overall accuracy and sentence processing patterns in role assignment in L3 Latin show L3 development as largely modulated by the L1, suggesting that higher levels of L2 resonance are necessary for integrated patterns of L1 and L2 cues to emerge.

This paper reports the findings of a four-year longitudinal study that examined the role of prior linguistic knowledge on the written L3 production of 93 Spanish/Catalan learners. Two research questions guided the study: the first asked whether a background language (L1s Spanish/Catalan, L2 German) would activate in parallel with L3 English during word construction attempts involving verbal forms, and if so, which would be the source language of blending. The second addressed the progressive readjustments of L2 activation and blending in the course of the first 200 hours of instruction. The elicitation technique was a written narrative based on a story telling task. Data were collected first when the learners were on average 9.9 years old (T1), and again at the ages of 10.9 (T2), 11.9 (T3) and 12.9 (T4). The focus of analysis was on word construction attempts that involved verbal forms. The results suggest that a background language, the L2, did indeed activate, especially at early stages of L3 acquisition.

The first part of this paper reviews research evidence for typological similarity and/or L2 status as determinants of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in multilingual lexical production. The second part presents a model of vocabulary acquisition as a framework to explain CLI at the levels of form, (syntactic) frame, and meaning, as well as some of the developmental changes that have been reported for CLI patterns in relation to L3 learners’ proficiency. It is suggested that these patterns can be related to default processes and stages involved in the acquisition of individual word forms and their integration into networks of existing lexical triads, as described in the Parasitic Model of vocabulary acquisition. The third part of this paper points to research into the complexity and non-linearity of multilingual lexical development and the need to learn more about it.