Chapter 3: Familiarity Efects on Lexical Access during L2 Word Reading

Twenty-nine less-fluent readers from a second-semester Spanish course read words and category names in English or Spanish. Readers’ reaction times were recorded for their categorization of words during two intra-lingual and two inter-lingual conditions. Statistical analyses reveal no significant difference between the Spanish-Spanish condition and the Spanish-English condition, and no difference between the two intra-lingual conditions. The results indicate that less-fluent readers were able to conceptually mediate while reading and categorizing L2 words. The authors suggest a revised view of an L2 learner’s progression from word association to concept mediation. Instead of looking at lexical access during word-level reading in terms of less-fluent and more-fluent learners, it may be more accurate to see the type of lexical access as correlated with the degree of familiarity of the lexical items themselves and as independent of the general notion of a reader’s level of proficiency.