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e agrowing interest in cross-linguistic influence of previously learned languages onadditional language acquisition at present. Cross-linguistic influence is usually termedas a super-ordinate term refers to phenomena of transfer which include instances ofnative language transfer, interlanguage transfer, avoidance due to the influence fromanother language system, and even reverse transfer of an interlanguage into a nativelanguage (De Angelis & Selinker, 2001). In terms of transfer itself, Odlin (1989: 27)defined it as “the influence resulting from similarities and differences between thetarget language and any other language that has been previously (and perhapsimperfectly) acquired”. According to Jarvis & Pavlenco (2008), language transfer wasthe influence of a person’s knowledge of one language on that person’s knowledge oruse of another language indicating that transfer happens not just in the linguistic facet,but in the comprehensive facets of a person’s language acquisition, in effect, whichequates cross-linguistic influence and transfer to certain extent. There are some otherresearchers who also described transfer in other different ways, but what they havesomething in common is the inclusion of non-native language as the source ofinfluence, which implies the potential transferability of both native language andnon-native language in interlanguage production.In this paper, both cross-linguistic influence and language transfer are used as acover term refers to the influence of previously acquired languages on the targetlanguage that is currently being acquired irrespective of the negligible distinctivemeaning given by different scholars.
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2.2 Third Language Acquisition (TLA)
Third language acquisition, as a new-developed research area, has long been ignored in the past years, which is usually considered as similar with second languageacquisition. Accordingly, this section makes clear what is called third languageacquisition to acquaint with concepts involved in this paper on the one hand andintroduces distinctive features that it possesses to distinguish it from second languageacquisition on the other.Language acquisition is the process that a person comprehends the language andthen produces it in the communication, which normally studies first languageacquisition of infants. When it comes to the notion of second language acquisition, itwas usually termed as acquisition of languages that were acquired after the firstlanguage or first languages in the case of infant bilingualism according toHammarberg (2001), which denotes that a person may acquire one or more L2s. Thedefinition of third language is associated with the well-established notions of firstlanguage and second language.Until the late 1980s, TLA research began to appear with the rapid developmentof theories of transfer in second language acquisition. Although it is a comparativelynew research area with many issues, it forms an independent branch of linguisticresearch. Based on the aforementioned definitions on L1 and L2, some scholarsexerted themselves in giving a definition of third language. Fouser (1995) definedthird language acquisition as the acquisition of a language or languages that werebeing acquired apart from learner’s first language and second language they hadacquired, which signifies that third language learners don’t just acquire three kinds oflanguages. Consistent with Fouser’s view, Jordá (2005) pointed out th