ABSTRACT
In second language acquisition (SLA) research, there has been much less attention paid to the lexicon than to other parts of language, although this picture is quickly changing. In fact, the lexicon may be the most important language component for learners, a notion that has developed in SLA owing, in part, to influences from outside the field. For example, even Chomskyan scholars and those who work within the Minimalist framework, who had at one point dismissed the importance of vocabulary, now claim that language learning is largely lexical learning. Many linguistic theories place the lexicon in a central place, which also suggests its importance in language learning. Levelt maintained that the lexicon is the driving force in sentence production i.e., in encoding or sentence generation, which he described as a formulation process:Formulation processes are lexically driven.
