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This study examined the production of L3 French words by Spanish–English bilinguals who had no prior knowledge of the L3. Using a shadowing task, 39 Spanish L1/English L2 and 18 Spanish monolingual speakers produced 26 tokens of word-initial voiceless plosive consonants in French, Spanish and English (15 Spanish and French tokens for the monolingual group). Importantly, Spanish and French plosives are typically produced with short-lag VOT, whereas English plosives are produced with a long-lag VOT and aspiration. The results of generalised mixed-effects models revealed that L3 French productions by the bilingual group fell between L1 and L2 values, and provided evidence that the bilingual group experienced influence from both their L1, Spanish and their L2, English, while the monolingual group produced the French as a Spanish-like short-lag. Additionally, a post-hoc analysis of individual differences revealed that a subset of participants experienced heavy L1 influence on their L3 productions, whereas the remaining participants showed a lower, but considerable, degree of L2 influence on L3 productions. These findings provide support for the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al., 2017) and suggest that the first exposure to a third language is not universal.
