L1, L2 and L3: Same or different?

Abstract

This text comments on the Keynote article ‘Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition’ by Marit Westergaard, who argues for Full Transfer Potential within the Linguistic Proximity Model in third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary points at some theoretical and methodological issues related to the Linguistic Proximity Model, e.g. the age factor in language learning, the role of metalinguistic knowledge and proficiency in L3 learning, and the lack of predictive power of the model.