Crosslinguistic Influence In The Chinese Lexical Acquisition Of Multilinguals

Nowadays, as multilingualism has become increasingly common for people around the world, the human beings’ capabilities of learning languages have been developed more than ever. Accordingly, the international students from all over the world, being the main teaching objects of Chinese as a Foreign Language, appear to be experienced language learners with multilingualism background. This research paper presents a focused discussion on the vocabulary acquisition under new circumstances.Research on third or additional language acquisition has been increasing since the1990s. Many scholars are convinced that studies based merely on the process of human’s second language acquisition are not adequate for establishing a generalized theory of non-native language acquisition. Correspondingly, it is reasonable to assume that this situation also applies to the acquisition of Chinese as a foreign language. Hence, based on the review of previous studies on multilingualism in western countries and Chinese as a second language in China, we observed and researched the cross-linguistic influence from different languages during the acquisition of Chinese words in two stages, and discovered that:At present, most non-English students in China learning Chinese are not learning a first foreign language.Non-English students from a same country may speak a same second language; Non-English students from different countries may also speak a common second language, for instance, English. In addition, these common second languages are normally acquired from long-term, formal classroom learning.English as a common second language will affect the Chinese lexical acquisition during an early stage learning, yet the main cross-linguistic influence still comes from the learner’s first language.The interactions among a learner’s multiple languages are affected synthetically by a number of factors rather than merely the learner’s mother language.