Lexical availability of young Spanish EFL learners: emotion words versus non-emotion words

Resumen

This study intends to contribute to L2 emotion vocabulary research by looking at the words that primary-school English as foreign language learners produce in response to prompts in a lexical availability task. Specifically, it aims to ascertain whether emotion prompts (Love, Hate, Happy and Sad) generate a greater number of words than non-emotion prompts (School and Animals). It also seeks to identify the words learners associate with each semantic category to determine whether the words produced in response to emotion prompts differ from non-emotion words. The results showed a significant difference in the number of words generated across prompts. Most words were produced for the prompt School, followed by Animals, Happy, Love, Hate and Sad. Non-emotion prompts elicited a higher number of words than emotion prompts, and within the latter, a significant effect of valence was observed as learners retrieved a higher number of words in response to positive emotion prompts than to negative prompts. Overall, learners’ lexical availability output in each of the six prompts showed the predominance of nouns over other word classes. However, slightly different patterns were also observed for the top 10 responses to Happy, Hate and Sad, and together with nouns, other word classes appeared as well. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.