Parasitism as a Default Mechanism in L3 Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstract

The human capacity to categorise new information on the basis of similarity with existing knowledge representations is, perhaps, the most important organising principle for mental representation. It is essential for the development of conceptual relations and networks (Rosch, 1978; Smith and Medin, 1981; Schönpflug, this volume), as well as for the acquisition and organisation of the mental lexicon (Fay and Cutler, 1977; Peters, 1983). In this chapter, we discuss a model of vocabulary acquisition that has as its cornerstone the detection and exploitation of similarity between novel lexical input and prior lexical knowledge. This processing and storage mechanism has been characterised metaphorically as a “parasitic learning strategy” (Hall, 1992), and is hypothesised to constitute a default cognitive procedure, modulated in practice by other factors external to the lexicon. Earlier versions of the parasitic model were developed to explain aspects of L2 vocabulary acquisition (Hall, 1996, 2002; Hall and Schultz, 1994). In the present contribution, we extend the model to L3 (following Ecke and Hall, 1998, 2000; Ecke 2001), using evidence from a corpus of spoken lexical errors in novice learners of L3 German.