An Empirical Study Of The Cross-Linguistic Influence On The Semantic Construction Of Chinese-English-Japanese Speakers

Language acquisition is an extremely complicated process, involving multiple factors at different levels. With a growing number of third language learners in the world, the cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition has aroused the interest of linguists, becoming the focus of inquiry. In second language acquisition, L1 semantic transfer has been discussed by numerous researchers, yet disagreement still exists as to whether L2 learners could develop a comprehensive L2 semantic system of their own. For L3 learners, the cross-linguistic influence could only be more complicated under the multi-lingual picture when three languages are involved. Exactly out of the curiosity about this under-explored field, researches are growing their concern on this issue. In the field of language acquisition and psycholinguistic studies, scholars have adopted a series of methodologies to examine the semantic development of foreign language learners, such as word association task, semantic relatedness rating, etc, and have met with varied success. With the development of cognitive science, however, researchers incline to adopt on-line mechanism to investigate semantic transfer, among which the most familiar ones are priming, picture naming, fMRI, etc. The introduction of these on-line mechanisms has provided more accurate empirical evidence for the question of concern.The present study explored the cross-linguistic influence on the L3 (Japanese) semantic construction of Japanese major students in Chinese universities with on-line semantic judgment test. Through the comparison of reaction times and error rates, and with the same-translation effect as an indicator for semantic transfer, this study intends to investigate the influence of language transfer on the semantic construction of Chinese-English-Japanese speakers.Major findings yielded from this study are as follows:1) The L2 semantic construction is influence by L1 semantic transfer both for English majors and Japanese majors in Chinese universities. In the semantic judgment test, participants yielded significant same-translation effect on L2 words, with the RT on L1 same-translation pairs faster than that of different-translation pairs.2) The L3 semantic construction of Chinese Japanese learners is influenced by L1 semantic concept. In the semantic judgment test, significant L1 same-translation effect was found when the word pairs appeared in Chinese-Japanese homographs, with subjects responding to L1 same-translation pairs noticeably faster than different-translation pairs.3) For Chinese Japanese learners, L2 hardly exert any influence on L3 semantic restructuring. No matter the word pairs appeared in the form of Chinese-Japanese homographs or non-homographs, the reaction time on same-translation pairs was not found faster than on different-translation pairs.4) Homograph effect exerts influence on L3 word recognition and semantic construction. The mean RT on Chinese-Japanese homographs is shorter than non-homographs, which indicates felicitation in word recognition. Meanwhile, the occurrence of L1 same-translation effect is affected by word orthography. When the L3 word pairs were presented as Chinese-Japanese homographs, a significant L1 same-translation effect was observed. In contrast, no L1 same-translation effect was found in Chinese-Japanese non-homographs.The above results offer compelling evidence of L1 transfer on the semantic restructuring of L2 and L3, yet cross-linguistic semantic influence from L2 to L3 is marginal is due to orthographical and typological difference. Based on the current study, a tentative model of form-meaning mapping process is proposed for Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals. It is advisable for the Chinese foreign language teachers to not only provide students with adequate L3 input, but also raise their consciousness that L1 may bring both positive and negative transfer to their third language learning.