A Study of the Relationship between L1 Lemma Influence and L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effect of L1 lemma on L2 vocabulary learning. For this purpose, this study hypothesized that students performed better in judging the semantic-relatedness in a same translation word pairs task than in a different translation word pairs task, and that their performance might be affected by context presence, grammatical category, and L2 proficiency level. 320 undergraduate students from three universities participated in the study and independent t-tests were employed for the data analyses. The results of this study showed that the participants judged the same-translation word pairs as more semantically related, which can support L1 lemma effect on L2 vocabulary learning. In addition,the results reported that the participants’ performance was affected by context presence,grammatical category, and L2 proficiency levels. Directions of further research and pedagogical implications were presented.