The Role Of L2 Proficiency On The Lexical Transfer In The Third Language Acquisition

Third language acquisition is a relatively new area of study in the applied linguistics. It has both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic foundations. This paper is intended to report a study about the effect of L2 proficiency on the lexical transfer in the third language acquisition. The subjects of the present study are 32 L1-Chinese, L2-English learners specializing in German as the third language, who are undergraduate students from the Foreign Language Department of Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The whole study undergoes two phases. In the first phase, the subjects fill out a questionnaire. In the second one, they are required to take a vocabulary test which contains 38 blanks in complete sentences.According to Ringbom, the lexical errors analyzed in this paper are categorized into the following five types: 1) complete lexical switches; 2) coinages; 3) deceptive cognates; 4) caiques; and 5) semantic extensions. These types of lexical transfer can be manifested as transfer of form and transfer of meaning. The first three types are single lexical items that show the transfer of form in common, not meaning while the latter two types are concerned with the transfer of meaning rather than meaning. Based on the analysis of the error types and relevant data, this paper explores the lexical transfer in the third language acquisition. The major findings are summarized as follows: (1) Because Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, while English and Germen belong to the Indo-European language family, the Chinese-English-German trilingual participants preferred transferring lexical items from L2, rather than from L1; (2) L3 learners with high L2 proficiency make more transfer than the learners with low L2 proficiency. Moreover, the learners with high L2 proficiency have more meaning-based lexical transfers than the learners with low L2 proficiency. The reliance on word forms, L1, L2, and L3 forms, will gradually decrease, and be replaced by a more organized network on a meaning basis when the language proficiency improves.