Chapter 4. Age and Vocabulary Acquisition in English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

Miralpeix, Imma

doi:10.21832/9781853598937-006

Cited by 23 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…This hypothesis was disconfirmed; the younger groups performed significantly worse than the two older groups. Our alternate hypothesis for LLAMA_B was that the older participants would outperform the younger ones (Miralpeix, 2006(Miralpeix, , 2009 due to their superior cognitive abilities, and this hypothesis was confirmed. Our third hypothesis was that the younger group (10-11-year-olds) would outperform the older groups on LLAMA_D because this taps into implicit learning processes (Granena, 2013(Granena, , 2016Skehan, 2016), which may be subject to critical period effects.…”

Section: Research Question 3: Agementioning

confidence: 62%

“…Our first hypothesis is that we would not see any differences between the groups as we continue to learn new words throughout our lives and so cognitive development or critical-period effects should not be evident. Our second hypothesis follows work by Miralpeix (2006Miralpeix ( , 2009) that older participants (over 11) would outperform the younger learners due to their increased cognitive advantages and maturity.…”

Section: Research Questions and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 92%

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Examining the LLAMA aptitude tests

Rogers

Meara

Barnett-Legh

et al. 2017

Journal of the European Second Language Association

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This study assesses the reliability 1 of the LLAMA aptitude tests (Meara, 2005). The LLAMA tests were designed as shorter, free, language-neutral tests loosely based on the MLAT tests (Carroll & Sapon, 1959). They contain four sub-components: vocabulary acquisition, sound recognition, sound-symbol correspondence and grammatical inferencing. Granena (2013) and Rogers et al. (2016) provided initial results regarding factors which might influence LLAMA test scores. This paper develops this previous work by examining some of issues raised with a larger cohort and focuses on the following research questions. Data were collected from 240 participants aged 10-75 for RQ1-3. We found no significant differences in terms of language background (RQ1) but instructed second language learners significantly outperformed monolinguals (RQ2). For RQ3 we found that the younger groups were outperformed by all the other groups.For RQ4, we investigated how much variance in LLAMA test results six individual background factors could explain. We combined data from Rogers et al. (2016) and this study giving 404 participants in total. Using a multiple regression analysis, we found that prior L2 instruction predicted more of the variance (6%) than any other factor. We suggest that when using the LLAMA tests, researchers should consider controlling for language learning experience.This study scrutinises the components of the LLAMA tests with a large set of data. We conclude that the results are robust across a range of individual differences but suggest that different norms may be needed for younger age groups and those who have received prior L2 instruction.

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Section: Research Question 3: Agementioning

confidence: 62%

Section: Research Questions and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 92%

Examining the LLAMA aptitude tests

Rogers

Meara

Barnett-Legh

et al. 2017

Journal of the European Second Language Association

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“…Notwithstanding this possible interpretation, in our data from low proficient learners, type/token ratio in the range of .50 might rather be indicative of discourse full of lexical words and lacking grammatical structure, maybe broken sentences, enumeration of nouns, and sentences with insufficient grammar links (cf. Hyltenstam 1988;Miralpeix 2006). Finally, we agree with Muñoz (2008) when she highlights that age at testing might have an impact on learners' test-taking skills and older learners' higher cognitive maturity allows them to understand the task better and thus perform better, and use more test-taking strategies (Tragant and Victori 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

“…Lexical diversity has been found to be a problematic measure when studying the vocabulary of certain groups of learners. For instance, lexical density is not a reliable measure for young beginning learners, since it tends to be very high in those students, due to their typical telegraphic discourse lacking function words and thus concealing an inability to build a coherent text (Hyltenstam 1988;Miralpeix 2006). It is, hence, frequent to use several measures upon the same text to help profile its lexical characteristics, due to the partiality of lexical richness measures (Housen et al 2008: 279-280).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teasing out the role of age and exposure in EFL learners’ lexical profiles: A comparison of children and adults

Agustin-Llach

Jiménez-Catalán

2018

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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The present paper examines the lexical profiles of children and adult EFL learners in an attempt to untangle the roles of age and hours of exposure and their effect on lexical knowledge. Both age and exposure time have generally been acknowledged as relevant factors influencing foreign language acquisition, and vocabulary learning specifically. Participants in the study, who share the same amount of exposure to the target language but differ in age, were asked to write an informal letter introducing themselves. Their letters were scrutinized and mean production of tokens and types was found together with word frequencies and some lexical inconsistencies. In addition, the children participating in the study were enrolled in a CLIL program to match their hours of instruction with those of the adults. Their lexical profiles are characterized by fewer tokens and types and words of lower frequency related to the fields of school, home and science, the CLIL subject. They also use more cognates and commit more lexical inconsistencies than adult learners, who in turn produce more general words in longer letters. We interpret our results in light of the relevant role of age and instructional program.

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“…The perception/production difficulties observed in older learners would thus be linked to extra-linguistic functions of the brain; the decline of these abilities would explain the greater difficulties in mastering phonology after a certain age. Explanations related to procedural differences ▸ support the idea that some linguistic domains are developed more implicitly than other areas (Flege, Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999;Miralpeix, 2006). Psychosocial explanations ▸ hold that the accent in L2 could be related to questions of identity (see De Houwer, 2014, for a discussion of this issue).…”

Section: Sensorimotor Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age and Foreign Language Learning in School

Lambelet¹,

Berthelé²

2015

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Chapter 4. Age and Vocabulary Acquisition in English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Examining the LLAMA aptitude tests

Examining the LLAMA aptitude tests

Teasing out the role of age and exposure in EFL learners’ lexical profiles: A comparison of children and adults

Age and Foreign Language Learning in School

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