The Influence of L1 Semantic Transfer on the Development of the L2 Mental Lexicon

Abstract

The Semantic Transfer Hypothesis (Jiang, 2000), formulated to explain a stage of vocabulary development in the second language (L2) mental lexicon, claims that learners automatically exploit first language (L1) semantic information in L2 use. It is claimed that existing L1 semantic information is automatically detected and new foreign language (FL) forms are subordinately connected in the L2 mental lexicon. In this study, English word pairs sharing the same L1 translation equivalent (Japanese) and word pairs that have different L1 translations were presented to Japanese advanced EFL learners in a semantic judgment task. Participants reported significantly faster reaction times (RTs) and less error percentage with the same translation pairs than with different ones. These results--along with the measure of the degree of semantic relatedness between each pair--were interpreted as evidence for the automatic use of L1 semantic information in the L2 mental lexicon.