Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (IEAS), course: Hauptseminar HS Applied Linguistics and Second/Foreign Language Education, language: English, abstract: 1.Introduction
“[T]he major challenge of learning and using a language – whether as L1 or L2 – lies not in the area of broad syntactic prin-ciples but in the ‘nitty-gritty’ of the lexicon.” (Singleton, 1999: 4)
With this statement Singleton asserts that syntax learning is comparatively sim-ple to lexical acquisition. Because “language is largely a matter of words” (Sin-gleton, 1999: 8), words are essential for “linguistic communication” (Singleton, 1999: 9). Therefore, many researches on the mental lexicon of the human first language (L1) have been published, and an increasing number of publications on second and/or foreign language (L2) acquisition – in particular L2 lexical ac-quisition – have raised interest also in this domain.
A crucial basis for research on L2 lexical acquisition is the awareness that the knowledge of at least one language is already present in the situation of acqui-sition. This basis leads to the following questions:
•How does first language lexical acquisition proceed?
•How does L2 lexical acquisition proceed in comparison to L1 lexical proc-esses?
•To what extent are L1 and L2 mental lexicons separated from or inte-grated with each other?
•To what extent are L1 and L2 lexical acquisition connected to the acqui-sition of grammar?
•In what way does lexical processing work and what does it imply for lexi-cal acquisition?
In this paper I do not only want to focus on these questions. Moreover, I want to consider the aspect of Foreign Language Education in terms of lexical acqui-sition. I will conclude my elaborations with regard to the question, what it actu-ally means to know a word.
Nevertheless, I have to define some important terms which I will use frequently throughout the paper. L1 refers to the human mother tongue which is normally acquired during infancy and within the first few years of life. But L1 can also refer to a second bilingually acquired language with a mother-tongue-competence. On the contrary, L2 can refer to any other language which has been acquired after the acquisition of the native language. This does not neces-sarily have to be the second but can also be the fourth or sixth foreign lan-guage one acquires. Whenever I am referring to language learning, I normally mean lexical acquisition in particular, as this is the main focus of this paper. Moreover, I frequently use terms such as ‘word’, ‘lexical unit’, ‘lexical item’ etc., which I do not further differentiate. I use them rather synonymously.
