The Effect of Age on EFL Learners’ Lexical Availability: Word Responses to the Cue Words ‘Town’ and ‘Countryside’

Abstract

Lexical availability research points to striking similarities in learners of different ages. It is claimed that similarities are due to the universal organization of L2 mental lexicon. In this chapter we adopt a corpus methodology to compare the lexical availability output of sixth grade primary school children and first year university students, English language learners. The aim was to ascertain whether if, holding language level constant, children and adults would retrieve the same number of word responses as well as similar or different types of words in response to the prompts ‘Town’ and ‘Countryside’. The findings suggest the existence of similarities regarding the number of words retrieved by each prompt but also more differences than similarities regarding the specific words activated by the cue words. These results reveal the existence of exclusive vocabularies in the available lexicons of young and adult English as Foreign Language (EFL) Learners of the same language level.