Cross-linguistic influence in trilingual acquisition: a study on production in Italian (L3) by Chinese(L1)-English(L2) speakers

Third language acquisition is a relatively recent area of research in applied linguistics, which has sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic foundations. This paper is intended to report a study about the cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition. The subjects of the present study are 19 L1-Chinese, L2-English learners specializing in Italian as the third language, all of whom grew up in China, received English language courses from primary school onwards, and all received Italian language courses at Chinese universities. In the first phase, the subjects filled out a questionnaire; in the second phase, they were asked to take two tests, the vocabulary test and the writing test. The vocabulary test contains 38 blanks in complete sentences, and in the writing test subjects are asked to describe a series of pictures given to them and write a short composition in Italian. In this paper, the errors produced by the subjects in the two tests will be collected according to previous research theories and methods, and then the results will be analyzed according to linguistic theory.