Second Language Lexical Processes : Applied Linguistics and Psycholinguistic Perspectives

The book contains studies on second language lexical processes based on empirical findings by authors mostly from Central Europe. The reader may have access to how lexical items are stored in the memory and also to how second language lexicons work in speech processing. Questions of the two lexicons’ integration or separation, the fashion of bilingual word storage, vocabulary acquisition and assessment, word retrieval from the memory and lexical access are the focus of the studies. The authors of the studies refer to analyses of different psycholinguistic experiments (e.g. a word association test, speech perception tests, a Cloze-test). Assessment of written work of second language learners both at secondary school and university levels is also provided. Second language lexical acquisition processes are described and the influences of different types of languages on each other are shown. The second languages involved are mainly internationally less widely investigated and published languages of Finno-Ugric (i.e. Hungarian) and Indo-European (e.g. Croatian, Polish, Russian, etc.) origin next to the more frequently studied English and German. The studies included in our volume focus on lexical acquisition and processing and also make reference to pedagogical questions. They include investigations of lexical perception, production, acquisitional processes and vocabulary assessment. The novelty of the book is that the studies make reference to Hungarian and a number of Slavic languages. They provide the reader with new perspectives on second language lexical acquisition processes when the source language and the target language are distinct from a typological point of view, the lexicon in processing terms. The book is intended for the use of undergraduate and graduate students of second language studies, psycholinguistics and/or bilingualism researchers, teachers and academics whose interests include a second language acquisition component.

Zsolt Lengyel is a professor at the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, a part time professor at the University of Pécs and a visiting professor at Zagreb University, Croatia. He took his MA in Hungarian, Russian philology and Applied linguistics at Debrecen University, Hungary. He received PhD in developmental psycholinguistics. He was given Brassai Sámuel Award in 2002. His research interests include language development of Hungarian children, development of literacy before schooling, bilingual education in the kindergarten, word associations of 10-14 year old children and students of 18-24 years of age. He has written numerous articles, books on the mentioned topics. He is editor, member of editorial boards of several applied linguistics journals both in Hungary and abroad.

Judit Navracsics is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary. Her research interests are bi- and multilingual development in early childhood, the bilingual mental lexicon and bilingual processing.