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Many offline studies on third language acquisition suggest strong connections between speakers’ L3 and L2 rather than between their L3 and L1, especially if the foreign languages are typologically related. However, a recent online study investigating trilingual processing did not provide evidence for such connections. This paper reports the results of two online experiments that investigated the influence of learning experience on the links between lexical representations in the trilingual mental lexicon in Polish learners of English and Chinese. The first experiment employed a picture–word interference paradigm: its goal was to determine the activation of languages in the minds of trilingual speakers who learn the L3 through the medium of their L2. The aim of the second study was to investigate the process of translation of high-frequency concrete nouns from the speakers’ L3 into their L2 and L1. The results from Experiment 1 suggest that learning experience exerts a significant influence on the connections between lexical representations of the languages that are extensively and concurrently used in acquisition. In Experiment 2 translation from L3 was faster into L1 than into L2, which provides further evidence for concept mediation in translation performed by trilinguals.
