The Incidence of Previous Foreign Language Contact in a Lexical Availability Task: A Study of Senior Learners

Abstract

Age, together with previous exposure to English, are the main issues addressed in this chapter. The authors looked at the effect of previous foreign language (English) contact on senior learners’ (age 55+) performance in a lexical availability task including 15 prompts, traditionally used in lexical availability studies. The results showed that false beginners outperform true beginners both for the total number of words produced in the lexical availability task and for most of the semantic categories contained in the task. The authors argued that beginners experience similar stages in vocabulary acquisition as a striking similarity is found in the available lexicons of the groups of senior English language learners in this study and that of young learners examined in other studies. Based on their findings, they also suggest that the ability of the older adult to learn new words is not impaired.