Investigating the role of previously acquired languages in L3 semantic access through long-term crosslanguage repetition priming

Abstract

The study's aim was to examine how learners with different L3 proficiency levels access the conceptual representations of L3 Spanish words through their previously acquired languages. To do so, a long-term crosslanguage repetition priming task was administered. During the encoding phase, eighty-eight (88) adult Tagalog-English bilinguals performed an animacy decision task using L3 words. The cues from the encoding phase were translated into either Tagalog or English to serve as the stimuli in the test phase. Participants in this phase were randomly assigned to one of their previously acquired languages and performed a lexical decision task in that language. We analysed the participants’ reaction times and accuracy rates in relation to their L3 proficiency, the language used in the LDT, and the condition, using mixed effects models. Contrary to previous L3 studies, such as that of Chen′s (2020. How do L3 words find conceptual parasitic hosts in typologically distant L1 or L2? Evidence from a cross-linguistic priming effect. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23(10), 1238–1253. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1439879) and Wang and Yang′s (2025. Beyond corpus data — complementary and alternative methods in cognitive linguistics. Review of Cognitive Linguistics , 23(2), 573–595. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00175.wan), no cross-linguistic repetition priming effects were found based on the L3 proficiency level nor on the condition variable. Only one significant effect was found in the Tagalog LDT group, where the participants responded more slowly than those in the English LDT group. We interpret our null results not as contradictory of the findings in previous literature but as support for Hall and Ecke′s (2003. Parasitism as a default mechanism in L3 vocabulary learning. In J. Cenoz, B. Hufeisen, & U. Jessner (Eds.), The multilingual lexicon (pp. 71–85). Kluwer.) Parasitic Model.