SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION OF NEWLY LEARNED L2 WORDS AND THEIR INTEGRATION IN THE L2 LEXICON

Abstract

The present semantic priming study explores the integration of newly learnt L2 German words into the L2 semantic network of German advanced learners. It provides additional evidence in support of earlier findings reporting semantic inhibition effects for emergent representations. An inhibitory mechanism is proposed that temporarily decreases the resting levels of the representations with which the new representation is linked and thus enables its selection despite its low resting level.