Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Six categories of vocabulary: false cognates, convergence, divergence,collocations, lexical void, and parallel words were reviewed and investigated focusing on the interlexical associations with relation to English and Turkish. It was observed that learners face difficulties with the words belonging to all these six categories to a certain extent. The data revealed that 'divergence' category was the hardest one and 'convergence' the easiest. Parallel category was surprisingly difficult whereas false cognates, collocations, and lexical voids showed to be not as difficult as expected. The results were interpreted in terms of difficulty of learning of word form as opposed to learning word meaning as well as the salience of L2 words caused by the differences between the L1 and the L2.