Lexical Choice Difficulties: A Psycholinguistic Study towards a Solution

Abstract

Lexes are the “building blocks” of language and no one could ever think that language acquisition could take place without considering its vocabulary the cornerstone a learner commences with, employing several cognitive and non-cognitive learning strategies in acquiring such vocabulary. In spite of the so many studies tackling different kinds of errors an L2 learner commits, there are fewer studies done on lexical errors and so few, if any at all, probing deeply the sources of such errors and their consequences. Thus, this study is intended to provide a psycholinguistic evidence for the possible sources lexical errors could be ascribed to. 50 essays have been selected randomly from 123 ones written by Arabic-speaking Yemeni learners of English given to them as homework assignments. Errors were identified, classified and tabulated. Then, sources were classified into four categories, viz. L1-transfer, L2-influence, mutual and unrecognized. The analysis shows that (44%) of the errors were ascribed to L1-transfer, (40%) to L2-influence, (12.8%) to mutual and (3.2%) to unrecognized. The Findings could be applied to ESL/EFL vocabulary teaching-learning contexts.

Keywords: Lexical Choice, Arabic-speaking Yemeni Learners, Psycholinguistics, Learning Strategies, Error Sources