Lemmatic transfer in vocabulary acquisition and its implications for English vocabulary teaching

Abstract

This study investigates whether L1 lemma mediation plays a role in the process of L2 vocabulary development and what causes such lemmatic transfer. The hypotheses were as follows: First, Korean learners of English would be influenced by the lexical representations of Korean translation counterparts in judging semantic distances of English word pairs. Second, this lemmatic transfer would be observed in L2 use as well as in L2 perception. In order to test these hypotheses with pre-service English teachers, the present study employed two tasks: a semantic distance judgement task and a contextualized word choice test. A survey on vocabulary learning strategies was also carried out to see if the types of vocabulary learning strategies influence the degree of lemmatic transfer. The results showed that the Korean learners were significantly influenced by their L1 lexical representations in the process of learning English words, failing to develop L2 semantic specifications. When compared to the reference group (English native speakers), they tended to perceive the same translation pairs to be closer in meaning than the different translation pairs even if they were equally related in meaning. Such L1 lemmatic transfer seemed to be entailed by vocabulary learning strategies. Some suggestions were presented for the direction of English vocabulary teaching.