Chapter 1 the study of collocations

2.4.2  Vocabulary as a Language Skill 
 
 
The first attempts to discover how L2 vocabulary is acquired led 
researchers to investigate how vocabulary is stored and then retrieved by L2 
 
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learners.  Evidence for a phonologically organised mental lexicon was provided 
by Fay and Cutler (1977), Cutler and Fay (1982) through an investigation of 
"malapropisms" (word substitution errors), e.g. 'we need a few laughs to break 
up the monogamy' instead of 'monotony' (Fay & Cutler 1977:505).  They conclude 
that the mental dictionary lists its entries according to syllable structure and/or 
stress pattern, and only within these categories according to sound (Fay & 
Cutler 1977:511).  
 
In investigating the problem of how new foreign words are stored in the 
learner's mental lexicon, Meara (1978) tested the word associations of 76 
English girls learning French in two London Comprehensive schools.  The girls 
were given a list of 100 French words and were asked to write down, beside 
each one, the first French word that it made them think of (Meara 1978:194).  
These associations were then compared with the word associations produced 
by native French speakers.  Meara concludes that the native speaker's mental 
dictionary is organised mainly on semantic lines while in L2 learners this 
semantic organisation seems to be much less well established (Meara 1978:208). 
 This lack of proper semantic organisation could be the source of difficulty that 
foreign language learners experience in processing both written and spoken 
foreign language material (Meara 1978:208).  Meara finds it plausible that 
learners follow a transition from a mental L2 lexicon organised on non-
semantic criteria to a more native-like one organised on semantic grounds.  
Meara's claim that there are transitional stages in the lexicon has been criticised. 
  The results of his research have been described as "simply messy" and failing 
 
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to confirm the existence of developmental patterns (Sharwood-Smith 1984:238). 
 Despite the negative criticism, Sharwood-Smith suggests that the networks of 
semantic associations that exist between words could be a viable avenue to 
explore in the investigation of L2 vocabulary acquisition. 
 
In a study of the acquisition of individual words, Meara and Ingle (1986) 
tested the acquisition and retrieval of 35 low-frequency French nouns by 
English-speaking learners.  The nouns were presented and practised 
phonetically.  They found that the beginnings of L2 words were relatively 
resistant to error, while subsequent consonants were more likely to be incorrect. 
 The results of Meara and Ingle's study are suggestive of how words are stored 
and retrieved from mental lexicon, but they are limited in that they pertain to 
words acquired phonetically.  Furthermore, they concern individual lexical 
items.  In a more recent paper Meara (1992) draws attention to the examination 
of vocabulary acquisition as a network of structures and associations.  
 
Laufer's (1990a) study showed that in vocabulary acquisition learners 
follow a similar developmental route according to the L1 acquisition = L2 
acquisition hypothesis which predicts that L2 learners follow a similar 
developmental route to that followed by a child learning the same language as 
L1 (Laufer 1990a:290).  Laufer compared adult EFL learners and English native 
speaking children in order to examine the similarities and/or differences that 
they experience in distinguishing between words of similar form (synforms), 
e.g. 'considerate' and 'considerable', 'extend' and 'extent', 'simulate' and 
'stimulate'.  Laufer concludes that native speaking learners of English and 
 
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foreign learners of English share the same order of difficulty in the acquisition 
of 'synforms', i.e. suffix synforms (e.g. considerable/considerate) created the 
most difficult synformic distinctions, followed by the vocalic (e.g. cute/acute), 
and then the prefix (e.g. superficial/artificial) and consonantal (e.g. price/prize) 
(Laufer 1990a:281).  Despite the interesting results, Laufer's study suffers from 
certain shortcomings: she compared adult foreign learners of English and 12-
year-old native speakers of English without justifying why she expected 
language development in these two groups to be comparable.  Further on, the 
multiple choice test she used for her research was poorly designed (e.g. the 
fourth distractor of each item is almost always one that is definitely wrong - in 
the 38 items tested, only one has (d) as the correct answer).  Despite its 
limitations Laufer's investigation suggests that in L2 vocabulary acquisition, 
too, there are developmental sequences. 
 
Palmberg (1987) also investigated patterns of vocabulary development in 
Swedish ESL learners in Finland.  Palmberg used 'spew' tests, which required 
the students to write down as many words as they could think of that began 
with a given letter (M or R).  This was done for one minute per week for 17 
weeks.  Palmberg found that the words produced by his subjects consisted 
mainly of textbook vocabulary.  Results also show a steady increase in the 
overall word-production capacity of the subjects over time (see also Palmberg 
1988). 
 
The acquisition of modal auxiliaries (i.e. can, could, may, and might) by 
L2 learners was investigated by Gibbs (1990).  She examined 75 Panjabi-
 
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speaking pupils on their expression of English modal auxiliaries and found that 
the acquisition of modal auxiliaries by the L2 learners follows an English L1 
developmental pattern. 
 
The acquisition of word formation processes was investigated by 
Olshtain (1987).  Word formation rules in Hebrew were tested using three tasks 
(production, evaluation and interpretation) with a group of native speakers and 
two groups of foreign speakers of Hebrew (advanced and intermediate levels).  
In the production task, subjects were asked to coin new terms for concepts not 
named in the conventional lexicon of Hebrew.  In the evaluation task, subjects 
were presented with five innovative forms representing word formation 
devices in Hebrew and asked to judge which of these forms was the most 
suitable name for a specified noun.  In the interpretation task, subjects were 
asked to supply the most likely meaning of an innovative blend.  Olshtain's 
results show that L2 learners acquire target word formation processes in a 
gradual progression, with the advanced learners exhibiting productivity that is 
very similar to native speaker's performance (Olshtain 1987:229).  It was also 
shown that at the advanced level the L1 influence in the application of L2 word 
formation devices is marginal, while at the intermediate level students rely 
mainly on word formation devices that were covered in their Hebrew course 
(i.e. affixation devices).  Olshtain's study strongly suggests a developmental 
process in the acquisition of word-formation rules. 
 
Giacobbe and Cammarota (1986) conducted an investigation of the 
relationship between L1 and L2 in the construction of lexis during the first 
 
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phases of L2 acquisition.  They collected their data by interviewing two Spanish 
subjects acquiring French during the first months of their stay in France.  They 
concluded that there are two approaches to the construction of lexis, systematic 
and non-systematic, depending on the learner's ability or inability to establish a 
relationship between the L1 and L2.  In the systematic approach, the learner 
forms a General Lexeme Construction Hypothesis (GLCH) which is concretised 
by a series of simple operations facilitating the transformation of L1 lexemes 
into L2 lexemes.  For example, Cacho, one of the subjects in the study, 
suppressed the final vowel of Spanish lexemes, e.g. [kurs] instead of 'curso' and 
[mism] instead of 'misma', in order to produce French lexemes, e.g. 'cours' and 
'meme'.   The GLCH is further complemented by parallel hypotheses 
concerning other aspects of the lexemes such as stress.  In the non-systematic 
approach, the learner just memorises words that are frequently used in her/his 
environment.  Even though Giacobbe & Cammarota's study reveals that a 
degree of systematicity can exist in the acquisition of L2 lexis, it has certain 
shortcomings.  First, their study was limited to the examination of only two 
Spanish adults acquiring French without formal instruction.  Second, the 
similarity of the subjects' mother tongue and the L2 could have accentuated the 
role of L1 in the construction of rules for the acquisition of lexis. 
  
In the studies reviewed above, vocabulary acquisition has been equated 
with the acquisition of individual words by  L2 learners, even though it has 
been suggested that an examination of vocabulary as a network of semantic 
and structural associations would be worthwhile (Meara 1992).  So far, results 
 
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suggest that in L2 vocabulary acquisition, too, there are certain patterns of 
development.  However, the scope of these studies has been mainly 
exploratory, and there has not been a systematic framework of investigation of 
patterns of vocabulary development.  The rest of this chapter will focus on 
studies exploring the acquisition of sequences of lexical items, i.e. lexical 
phrases and collocations.