Paul Meara

VOCABULARY ACQUISITION: A NEGLECTED ASPECT OF LANGUAGE LEARNING

This article is an attempt to redress this neglect. It summarises the current work being done on vocabulary acquisition, and draws attention to a number of studies carried out by experimental psychologists which may have implications for the development of vocabulary in the second language. The article ends with a number of questions which have not been investigated in any depth, but which seem to me to be worth looking at more closely. A: Bibliographies and general works Despite the comments above about the general level of neglect in the study of vocabulary acquisition, there do exist a number of bibliographies of relevance to anybody working in this field. The most important of these is Dale and Razik 1963, a very extensive work, not primarily concerned with foreign language acquisition, but containing three relevant subsections with some 150 references. The 1963 edition of this work is actually a reworking of an earlier edition, and this may account for the fact that most of the references relate to second language work carried out in the 1930s. The most recent bibliography dealing specifically with L2 vocabulary acquisition is Twomey 1979. This work is patchy in its coverage, however, and a fuller bibliography, using a larger database, is in preparation (Meara, in prep.).

An alternative to multiple choice vocabulary tests

This paper reports a preliminary evaluation of the Y/N technique for producing tests of vocabulary knowledge. The results obtained suggest advantages over the more traditional multiple choice format for testing vocabulary.

The rediscovery of vocabulary

This article reviews four recent books of current research in vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary acquisition has moved from being a neglected backwater in second language acquisition (SLA) to a position of some importance, and this importance looks like increasing as lexical issues become more central to theoretical linguistics.The review suggests, however, that most vocabulary research in applied linguistics is based on a narrow linguistic agenda that was to a large extent defined by the concerns of the vocabulary control movement in the 1920s, particularly the work of H.E. Palmer and his successors (Smith, 1998; Institute of Research in Language Teaching, 2000). Current work in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics does not seem to have made much of an impact on the field, and this has led to a serious divergence between the theories of vocabulary acquisition that appear in these books, and the theories that are developing in other related fields.

The effects of script on visual search

Native English speakers search short strings of letters differently from the way they search strings of nonalphanumeric symbols. Experiment 1 demonstrates the same contrast for native Spanish speakers. Letter search, therefore, is not a result of the peculiarities of English orthography. Since visual search is sensitive to the nature of the symbols being processed, different scripts should produce different effects. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed such differences for Arabic and Chinese scripts. Furthermore, these experiments showed no evidence that native Arabic and native Chinese speakers adapt their search strategy when dealing with letters. Implications of these findings are considered.

How People Listen to Languages They Don't Know.

This study investigates how people listen to and recognize unknown foreign languages. We examine the ability of subjects to describe, transcribe and identify six foreign languages which have various significance in the sociolinguistic context of greater London: Farsi, Punjabi, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic and Urdu. Unknown foreign languages represent linguistic stimuli as sound patterns without meaning. As such, they raise a number of interesting questions: What aspects of a linguistic stimuli can be processed in the absence of meaning? Do lay people have an awareness of their linguistic environment? Does passive experience affect language awareness? Our findings indicate that the judgments made by untrained listeners are actually quite complex. Although subjects lacked the vocabulary necessary to accurately describe phonetic features, they did offer reports of segmental, suprasegmental, and other impressionistic details. A strong recency effect was found. Our listeners appeared to use a variety of strategies in attempting to identify the target languages. Subjects did appear to have a “feel” for the language family or geographical area where the target language was spoken. Presumably this arises because of general exposure to foreign languages in the media, and from personal contacts. We discuss some evidence from research on categorical perception and the psychology of music which offers a possible interpretation of these findings.

Can people discriminate languages they don't know?

Unknown foreign languages occassion instances where the sound stream does not evoke semantic interpretation. Studies of listener performance on tasks devised with such stimuli can shed light on how prelexical auditory-verbal processes are carried out. Monolingual English speaking subjects (N = 16) were asked to discriminate between samples from two unknown foreign language. Performance of subjects was only a small degree above chance, while at the same time giving reliable information about recognition and identification. Results are discussed in light of recent work on unknown voice discrimination and identification.

The formal representation of words in an L2 speaker's lexicon

This paper reports an analysis of errors made by English-speaking learners of French. Forty learners learned a set of French words, and were subsequently tested in their ability to produce a correct phonetic form for these words. Nearly two-thirds of the attempts were incorrect, but a detailed analysis of these incorrect forms showed that not all parts of the target form were equally liable to error. Initial consonants are particularly stable, while subsequent parts of words are not reliably recalled. These results share some similarities with studies of slips of the tongue in English.