LINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE DETERMINANTS OF LEXICAL ACQUISITION IN A SECOND LANGUAGE*

Abstract

The meaning ascribed to select English spatial prepositions by adult English speakers was compared to that of advanced adult ESL learners. Two measures were used: a semantic‐relatedness test and a cloze‐type/sentence‐completion test. The ESL learners differed substantially from the native speakers in the semantic boundaries they ascribed to the words. The differences derived from a different weighting of the words' semantic dimensions. The weighting of the words'semantic dimensions by the ESL learners was influenced by native‐language transfer. The words' usage was related to the degree of similarity in the linguistic classification of corresponding meanings in the L1 and the L2 and the consequent conceptual restructuring required in the acquisition of the L2 words. The meaning ascribed to central members of the semantic category investigated more closely approximated that of native speakers than the meaning assigned to noncentral ones. The findings are shown to be related to the similar linguistic classification of central concepts of semantic categories across languages and the language‐specific classification of noncentral ones. The findings are interpreted as evidence that the principle of prototypicality underlies the structure of all languages as well as the cognitive processes involved in language acquisition.