چكيده لاتين :
In this study, three issues were addressed: (1) The accommodation of new third language words in the mental lexicon, (2) the development of third language lexical structure, and (3) the general process of lexical network building. The three languages studied were Persian (Farsi) as the mother tongue of the participants, English as a second language they learned at high-school and German as their third language, a language they learned for academic purposes. One attempt was to explore the manner in which word forms are connected to the other words in the multilingual minds. The main issue, however, was to see if this connection is mediated by the first language or not. Another attempt was to check the claim made by many first language researchers that multilingual peopleיs first languages play a privileged role in the acquisition of subsequent languages. The reaction times measured showed that despite the claims in the literature, first language does not seem to have a determining role in the development of a third language.
