ABSTRACT
Vocabulary has rapidly changed in status from ‘a neglected aspect of language learning’ (Meara 1980) to an area of growing research and publication, as exemplified by this collection of papers. There are now theories of L2 vocabulary acquisition, a wide (and growing) range of teaching techniques available, and a greatly increased awareness on the part of most teachers (and learners) of the importance of vocabulary development. At the same time, understanding of the psychological aspects of L2 vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary use is still rather limited. There is a considerable history of research on memory which has provided many valuable insights, and also useful experimental work on short and medium term retention of L2 vocabulary (for references see McDonagh 1981, Chapter 5; Meara 1982; Nation 1982; Cohen and Hosenfield). Equally there is a large literature on psycholinguistic research into the mental lexicon of bilinguals (for references see Albert and Obler), but this work generally focuses on balanced bilinguals, not L2 acquirers. Hence a key question for L2 theory to which we still need an answer is: what is the nature of the representations of L2 words in a learner’s longterm memory, or to put this another way, what does the L2 mental dictionary look like? For LI, research on the nature of the mental lexicon is reasonably well developed, with research findings and resultant models available. This paper describes some relevant theoretical and descriptive work in the psycholinguistics of LI, and discusses its possible applications to L2 acquisition (for a similar approach, see studies by Meara 1982; Ingle and Meara forthcoming; James 1984). The psycholinguistic work concerns the analysis of one type of speech error made by native speakers, and a model of the mental lexicon which has been proposed by Fay and Cutler to account for such errors (Fay and Cutler 1977; Hurford 1981; Cutler and Fay 1982).
