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sent study. As an L3 acquisition, the acquisition of English forBouyei students certainly is affected by their pre-existing languages, hence the firstsection is about the clarification of some terminological issues and a systematicreview of cross-linguistic influence in L3 acquisition. Moreover, the exploration onthe relationship among the three involved languages in Bouyei students’ Englishaspiration acquisition requires a review of studies on cross-linguistic influence in theacquisition of phonology both in domestic and at abroad.

2.1 Definitions of the key terms
Cross-linguistic influence is a super-ordinate term of “language transfer”, thediscussions of which are usually considered to begin in the 1940s and 1950s (Odlin,2001). It is widely accepted that the term “transfer” stemmed from Weinreich’s (1953)study of the influence that one language had on another and it emphasizes negativetransfer in language contact. However, the phenomena of transfer in language contactgo far beyond “negative transfer”. And it has stirred fierce controversies regarding thedefinition in second language acquisition. Different interpretations of this conceptsprang up, which actually reflected the different developmental periods of transfertheory.Odlin (2001) has attempted to define transfer as the influence caused by thesimilarities and differences between the target language and any other previouslyacquired language. And he has made four conceptions of transfer clear: transfer is notsimply a consequence of habit formation because the acquisition of a second languageneed not lead to any replacement of the learner's previous language; transfer is notjust interference since the influence of L1 can be positive and negative; transfer is notsimply the result of falling back on old knowledge or the native language since nativelanguage influence interacts with other influences; transfer is not always nativelanguage influence because there may exist more than one language in learners’previously acquired language system.
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2.2 Differences between second language acquisition and thirdlanguage acquisition
Therefore, when regarding the cross-linguistic influence, in the process ofacquiring a second language, learners can only receive that from L1 while in thirdlanguage acquisition they can be influenced by more and two more bi-directionalrelationships can be found out: (1) the influence between L1 and L3 is bi-directional(L1?L3); (2) between L2 and L3, cross-linguistic influence can also take place(L2?L3).Furthermore, Cenoz (2000) finds out sociolinguistic factors andpsycholinguistics processes have relationship with the differences between SLA andTLA. When considering the sociolinguistic factors, linguistic typology should betaken into account, since languages which are typological closer to the target languagemay facilitate its acquisition. Nunan & Lam (1998) classify languages in amultilingual society as superior and inferior. Among them, the dominant languagetends to have higher social status and political power. It causes the different formatsand objectives in bilingual and multi-lingual society.The psycholinguistic processes signify that when learning a third language thelearners may put more emphasis on internal cognitive processing by presenting morelanguages systems interrelated. It becomes more complicated than when acquiring asecond one, for the complex cognitive structure calls for more proces