Concepedia

LEXICAL UNITS AND THE LEARNING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE VOCABULARY

Studies in Second Language Acquisition · 2001 · 150 citations · 15 references

TL;DR

L2 vocabulary learning has traditionally used the vague notion of “word,” which this paper replaces with Cruse’s (1986) concept of “lexical unit.” The paper defines lexical units in lexical semantics and applies the concept to the L2 learning task. The authors conducted two experiments: one comparing totally new lexical units with multiword items composed of familiar forms, and another comparing different new senses of familiar forms. Both studies show that knowledge of form, but not of previously learned meaning, is crucial for learning new meanings of familiar forms.

Abstract

In this paper the concept of “lexical unit” as proposed by Cruse (1986) is introduced in the context of L2 vocabulary learning to replace the rather vague notion of “word.” In the first part of the paper, this concept is defined in terms of lexical semantics and then applied to the L2 learning task. The second part describes two experimental studies in which the learning of different types of lexical units is examined. In the first study, totally new lexical units are compared with multiword items that are made up of familiar forms. In the second experiment, different types of new senses of familiar forms are compared. Both studies underscore the importance of knowledge of form—but not of previously learned meaning—for the learning of new meanings for familiar forms.