The mental lexicon of multilingual adult learners of Italian L3: A study of word association behavior and cross-lingual semantic priming

This study, a partial replication of the study conducted by Fitzpatrick & Izura (2011) on bilingual speakers, investigates the structure and processing of the mental lexicon of multilingual speakers of first language (L1) Swedish, second language (L2) English and third language (L3) Italian in order of acquisition. By way of word association tasks in all three languages, the effect of language status (L1, L2, L3) and association category (i.e., the different kinds of word association responses) on reaction time (RT) and association distribution (i.e., proportion of associations in different association categories) is measured. Results show a significant effect of language status on association distribution and on RT. The present study also investigates the effect of long-term cross-lingual semantic priming and lexical mediation between L3 and L2 in a lexical decision task (LDT), i.e. if the activation of L3 conceptual information is mediated by the corresponding word form in the L2. The primes in this study are English words whose Italian translation equivalents were present in the prior L3 Italian word association task. The translation equivalents obtained shorter RTs compared to control words, which indicates that L2 English words were activated during the L3 Italian word association task. The kind of cross-lingual priming found in the multilinguals investigated in this study would imply that, besides the L1, also an L2 could mediate in lexical processing, and that the L1 does not have a privileged status in that respect.