Introduction

Reported here are the first results of an experimental study of the acquisition of a second language in the laboratory under controlled conditions. The overall project aimed at tracking the time-course of the acquisition of a specially-designed artificial language. The acquisition of both lexicon and grammar was tracked through repeated tests over a 5-week instruction period. Some of the tests involved cognitive tasks, while others involved more natural linguistic performance tasks. In this paper I report the results of the acquisition of the lexicon.

Most applied linguistic studies in the area of second language vocabulary focus on instructional method, and test conscious lexical competence in or out of communicative context. While I used one conscious lexical translation task, the bulk of my study involved testing the development of two subconscious – automated – cognitive skills: (1) word recognition; (2) semantic priming. The impetus for my use of these cognitive tasks does not come from studies of second language acquisition, but rather from two lines of cognitive-psychological work on the fluent processing of native vocabulary.

The first line of cognitive research concerns the recognition of word forms. Sieroff and Posner (1988) and Sieroff, Pollatsek and Posner (1988) have shown that the recognition of habituated, native word forms is automatic and does not demand attention. This contrasts with the recognition of nonhabituated nonsense letter strings, which is attentiondemanding. We have reproduced these results previously in a study of second language learners (Givon, Yang & Gernsbacher, 1990).