This empirical study aims to shed light on L3 initial-stage transfer and later development by investigating Q-operations in L1 English–L2 Cantonese and L1 Cantonese–L2 English bilinguals’ L3 Mandarin and L1 English speakers’ L2 Mandarin at low and high proficiency levels. Data from an online cross-modal priming task and an offline acceptability judgement task found that structural similarity determines transfer source selection. Adopting a de-compositional approach to cues of different domains, we have found both facilitative and detrimental transfer effects from Cantonese, with the latter triggered by orthographic and phonological cues. Our data also suggest that detrimental transfer effects can persist at an advanced stage and that L3 development and acquisition results can be affected by various factors such as word frequency and the nature of learning situations.

中文翻译：

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理清三语习得迁移和发展中不同领域的线索：对二语/三语普通话是非问题的调查

本实证研究旨在通过调查 L1 英语-L2 粤语和 L1 粤语-L2 英语双语者的 L3 普通话和 L1 英语使用者的 L2 普通话在低熟练度和高熟练度水平下的 Q 操作，揭示 L3 初始阶段的迁移和后期发展。来自在线跨模态启动任务和离线可接受性判断任务的数据发现，结构相似性决定了传输源的选择。通过对不同领域的线索采取分解的方法，我们发现了粤语的促进和有害的转移效应，后者是由拼写和语音线索触发的。我们的数据还表明，有害的迁移效应可能会持续到后期，并且 L3 的发展和习得结果可能会受到各种因素的影响，例如词频和学习情境的性质。