L’accès au lexique mental dans une langue étrangère : le cas des francophones apprenant l’anglais

• Main Author: Heather Hilton
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO 2003-12-01
• Series: Corela
• Subjects: acquisition du vocabulaire; lexique mental; accès lexical; tâche de décision lexicale; temps de réaction
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corela/676

Studies on L2 vocabulary acquisition tend to focus on the lexical knowledge learners have stored, but some researchers feel that the access to this lexical knowledge plays a determining role in communicative competence. French learners of English, for example, may have efficient access to the written forms of English words, due to the large number of words shared by the two languages. The very different phonological systems of the two languages might lead to problems in the processing of the spoken forms of the same words. An experiment, based on the lexical decision task, was developed, to compare lexical access times between a group of French learners of English, and native speakers. The French learners did indeed perform very differently on the task, depending on the mode in which the words were presented (written or spoken forms).