The Acquisition of Lexical Boundaries in English by Native Speakers of Spanish

Methodological Rigor in the Study of Transfer: Identifying L1 Influence in them Interlanguage Lexicon

“…Logically speaking, however, there is yet a third possible intersubjective distributional effect of L1 influence, which can be described as similarities in the use of a common L2 by learners who speak the same L1. This effect is rarely mentioned in the literature, but it nevertheless represents a crucial type of evidence that is at least implicit in several transfer studies (e.g., Gass, 1983;Graham & Belnap, 1986;Selinker, 1983;Wieden, 1990). I will discuss its importance shortly, after having restated the logically possible effects of L1 influence in an order of increasing analytical complexity.…”

“…In her descriptive analysis, however, McClure did note that instances of lexical transfer were common in her data, especially those involving either the overextension or levelling of the semantic range of an L2 lexical item through analogy with a perceived L1 translation equivalent (pp. 150-151; see also Graham & Belnap, 1986;Ringbom, 1987). McClure's (1991) findings are thus clearly relevant to the present investigation, although the empirical method she employed does not directly address my stated research question, nor does her study represent methodological rigor as an investigation of L1 influence.…”

“…One study that is particularly relevant to the question of L1 influence on learners' word choice is Graham and Belnap (1986). In this study, the researchers adapted to the second language acquisition setting a technique originally introduced by Labov (1973) in which participants were shown several series of related pictures that varied in dimension.…”

“…The relevance of the Graham and Belnap (1986) study to the present investigation is seen in the researchers' focus on learners' lexical reference to a controlled set of visual stimuli. However, this relevance is limited because Graham and Belnap examined only learners' receptive lexical knowledge in a contrived and nonnarrative-like referential context.…”

New approaches to concepts in bilingual memory

“…Distinguishing between the semantic and the conceptual level is crucial for the study of bilingualism, as it will help us to differentiate between bilinguals who acquired their languages in different contexts and who have different degrees of language pro®ciency and cultural competence. For example, word meanings acquired in decontextualized classroom environments are often attached to L1 conceptual representations and, thus, lead to conceptual transfer and categorization along the lines of the ®rst language and culture (Graham & Belnap, 1986). For language-speci®c concepts, such as``privacy'', classroom learners' word meanings may be attached to an impoverished mental representation; as a result, their non-linguistic behaviors do not correspond to the non-linguistic behaviors of learners who acquired the concept through meaningful social interaction and thus developed a full mental representation (Pavlenko, 1997).…”