Language Anxiety: Its Relationship to Other Anxieties and to Processing in Native and Second Languages*

Abstract

This study investigated the factor structure underlying 23 scales assessing both language anxiety as well as other forms of anxiety. Three factors were obtained and identified as Social Evaluation Anxiety, State Anxiety, and Language Anxiety. Correlations were obtained between scores based on these factors and measures of short‐term memory (a Digit Span test) and vocabulary production (a Thing Category test). These two measures were administered in both LI (English) and L2 (French) versions. It was shown that Language Anxiety was correlated significantly with both Digit Span and Thing Category scores, but only in L2. Further analyses indicated that the French tasks were more anxiety‐provoking than were the English ones and that for LI, digit span was more anxiety‐provoking than was vocabulary. These results are interpreted in terms of the deficits created by anxiety during the cognitive processing of L2 stimuli.