Tres niveles de la representación mental: Evidencia de errores léxicos en estudiantes de un tercer idioma

Abstract

This study investigates errors in the written production of beginning and intermediate learners of English and German as foreign languages. Three types of lexical transfer
 errors are identified: semantic (meaning) errors; syntactic errors; and orthographic (form) errors. The occurrence of these error types is taken as evidence for three levels of mental representation: a non-linguistic conceptual level at which objects; events and the relations between them are represented; a syntactic level; specifying abstract grammatical properties; and a form level; at which phonological and orthographic representations are stored. The three error types suggest that cross-lexical influence exists at all representational levels; and not only from LI to L2 or L3; but also from L2 to L3; and even within each language. The data show that learners build and
process new foreign language words by using a “parasitic strategy”: they exploit any detectable similarity with already existing lexical knowledge.