Acquisition of referential meaning of words in a second language

Abstract

The present study aims to search how L2 learners learn words. In particular, the acquisition of referential meaning of an L2 word, chair, was investigated in this study. The variables of the study were L2, L1 and prototypicality. The study was carried out in the Faculty of Education, Uludağ University, Turkey. Two different groups of subjects were used in the study. One group was the group of EFL learner subjects who helped to determine the second language "chair" category. The EFL learners were of different proficiency levels which was tested by a cloze test. The other group was the group of Turkish Native Speaker subjects. The Turkish Native Speakers' data were used to determine Turkish "sandalye" and "koltuk" categories. A picture test was used to test L2 category membership, L1 influence and prototypicality. Analysis of the results showed that as the proficiency increased, there occurred a tendency for more native like categorisation. The other results was that subjects were more accurate on non-chair items than chair items. Another result was that the performance of the subjects increased as the prototypicality of the items increased. A final result was that L1 has an influence on the referential range of L2 words.