Lexical production and organisation in L2 EFL and L3 EFL learners: a distributional semantic analysis of verbal fluency

Research is scarce about the lexical processes undertaken by thousands of L2 learners worldwide who already command one or more languages. Some aspects involved in lexical organisation and production, such as clustering and switching, have been traditionally approached through manual methods, which depend on subjective judgments of semantic relatedness between words. The present study seeks to provide a more objective exploration of EFL lexical production and organisation strategies of two rather similar groups of 12th grade learners of EFL as L2 and L3 via a distributional semantic analysis of semantic fluency. In addition to common measures of vocabulary performance, such as number of words produced, a series of lexical organisation and production strategies along with global and local semantic relatedness metrics will be examined. No differences were found about word frequency. While the L3 group used more word classes and cognates, and produced more idiosyncratic responses, the L2 group excelled in most semantic relatedness variables. These results might be due to the presence of the third language in the L3 group, which might be partly interacting with the other background languages. Evidence on these aspects may inform the development of precise language learning strategies adapted to the learner's linguistic profile.