An Empirical Study On The Cross Linguistic Influence Of Chinese(L1) And English(L2) On Japanese(L3) Lexical Acquisition

In recent years, more and more people begin to learn foreign language with the development of globalization. Some people even learn more than one foreign language in order to improve their competitiveness. In addition, colleges also develop second foreign language curriculum and double foreign languages constantly on the training mode of students. Therefore, the search of the third language and even multilingual learning is increasing gradually all over the world, which has caused the attention of linguists. The third language acquisition, short for TLA, is a new research field which appears in the late 1980 s with the deep research of SLA, especially the development of transfer theory. It mainly deals with various social and psychological factors concerned with TLA. At present, the research of TLA is still in a stage of development, which has great research prospects and potential.The major groups who learn the third language are students majoring in English, non-common foreign languages and minority students, among whom most of them are Chinese-English-Japanese language learners. When they learn the third language, they will be influenced by their mother tongue and second language. Therefore, this study will provide a kind of consciousness and method for the TLA learners, and reveal the relationships and influences among languages to promote the efficiency of language learning.This paper discusses the cross-linguistic influence of Chinese and English on Japanese lexical acquisition, which mainly studies from the perspective of second language proficiency and language distance. There are following three research questions in present study.Q1. How do Chinese(L1) and English(L2) impact on Japanese(L3) lexical acquisition from the perspective of language distance?Q2. Does English(L2) proficiency correlate with Japanese(L3) lexical acquisition?Q3. How does English(L2) proficiency impact on morphophonology and semantics of L3 lexical acquisition?The results prove that language distance is an important influencing factor in third language acquisition, especially in the similarity of language transfer. The more similarities two languages are, the easier they will generate transfer. However, language distance is more clearly delimited as objective language type distance and psychological distance. The study shows that psychological language distance also affects the lexical learning of Japanese(L3). The results also show that English(L2) proficiency affects the vocabulary acquisition of Japanese(L3), which means that the higher English(L2) proficiency is, the easier English(L2) transfer occurs; as well as the learner who has high English(L2) proficiency is easy to occur lexical semantic transfer,while learners who has low English(L2) proficiency is easy to occur lexical morphophonological transfer and English(L2) proficiency. At the same time, the study shows that semantic transfer will be more if the L2 learner has high English level while morphophonological transfer is more if the L2 learner has low English level.The TLA research has achieved initial achievement in China, but the breadth and depth of the study is far from enough. On theoretical aspect, it fulfills and perfects the theory of TLA and transfer in Southwest region of China to some extent. On the other hand, this study provides teaching guidance and teaching strategy to TLA teaching in colleges and helps students improve their TLA learning efficiency according to the situation and characteristics of China’s TLA acquisition.