L1 influence in L2 lexical availability: lexical evidence for thinking for speaking?

Résumé

This paper presents a preliminary study of the influence of the native language and culture in a lexical availabilitytask. L1 influence can be formal such as in the case of cognates, false friends, or borrowings for instance, and/orsemantic and conceptual. These last types of influence might reflect not only linguistic but also cultural nativemanifestations or uses. Semantic transfer refers to the attachment of meaning traits to L2 lexical items. It isinterference at the linguistic level. Conceptual transfer, on its part, rests on the assumption that an L1 concept has anL2 equivalent. Thus, for instance, the Spanish concept “pueblo” is transferred to L2 English rendered as “village”,which does not allude to the same idea or concept, but to a conceptually different representation or reality.Here we explore how 256 Spanish EFL learners are influenced by their L1 in the completion of a lexical availabilitytask. They were asked to write the words that came to their mind as reaction to 15 prompts and had 2 minutes to dothis. Here, we concentrate on a single prompt “countryside”.Results show that learners keep their L1 partially active while completing the task. They are successful in suppressingL1 formal influence, but the conceptual information they carry is mostly L1-shaped. Several reasons can account forthis. First, learners do not have enough L2 proficiency to fully master conceptual differences between the native andthe target language. Second, they have never been to an English-speaking country, so their interpretation of theworld and its realities still almost fully bases on L1 knowledge and L1 culture. Third, the limited amount of time torespond to the task might also trigger recourse to the L1 conceptual world. This phenomenon can be seen asevidence for a thinking-for-speaking influence in lexical development.