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How do L3 words find conceptual parasitic hosts in typologically distant L1 or L2? Evidence from a cross-linguistic priming effect

ABSTRACT The parasitic model proposes that novel words in L3 learning will build parasitic connections to already learned words that share orthographic or phonological similarities. This accounts for little in terms of the connections between words that share very few similarities. The present study explored the parasitic connections of L3 word concepts to learned typologically distant languages. Tibetan L1 learners of English L3 with different levels of L2 Chinese proficiency from a Chinese Tibetan middle school participated in a series of experiments based on a cross-linguistic repetition priming paradigm to investigate the L3 word concept connections to the two learned languages. The results showed that the L3 words took the nearest translation equivalents in L2 words as the first and sole parasitic hosts when the L2 was at a high proficiency level, but when the L2 was at a low proficiency level, both L1 and L2 were selected.