Lexical inventions: French interlanguage as L2 versus L3

The usual source of crosslinguistic influence in the interlanguage of a person learning a first foreign language (L2) is quite obviously his/her L1. Pinpointing the source of crosslinguistic influences in the interlanguage of a multilingual speaker is less straightforward. The main source of crosslinguistic influence in the L3 of a speaker is not automatically, as the present study shows, the L1 of the speaker. This paper investigates this phenomenon in the context of nontarget-like lexemes ('lexical inventions') in the advanced oral French interlanguage of 39 Dutch L1 speakers, 32 of whom had French as an L2 and English as an L3, the remaining 7 speakers having English as an L2 and French as an L3. Our results show that a higher proportion of lexical inventions produced by the French L2 speakers derive from creative (non-standard) use of target language rules compared to the French L3 speakers. Crosslinguistic influence is visible in the lexical inventions of both groups but the French L2 speakers seem to rely more on information attached to their Dutch L1 lemmas, whereas the French L3 speakers draw more on their English L2 lemmas. This suggests principles blocking L1 transfer in L3 learners in terms of spreading activation (cf. Green 1986; Poulisse and Bongaerts 1994).