Lexical Availability: At The Crossroads Of Disciplines

Lexical Availability : at the Crossroads of Disciplines
Bianca Sandu

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Department of Spanish Language and Literature
bsandu@becarios.ulpgc.es

Résumé
La disponibilité lexicale est un domaine de connaissance qui vise à découvrir les mots qui viennent
immédiatement et naturellement à notre esprit, quand la conversation tourne sur une série destimuli. Notre
recherche se concentre sur le vocabulaire dont disposent 280 étudiants de collèges et lycées bilingues
roumains-espagnoles (de Bucarest). L'objectif principal de cette étude est de déterminer si les facteurs
‘sexe’, ‘avoir effectué un séjour dans un pays hispanophone’ et ‘niveau de compétence’, affectent la
disponibilité lexicale en espagnol comme langue étrangère. L'analysequantitative et qualitative de chacune
de ces variables, ainsi que leur corrélation, mettent en lumière des résultats remarquables dont l'explication
peut être trouvée uniquement en se tournant vers d'autres disciplines, telles que la sociolinguistique ou les
sciences cognitives.

Abstract
Lexical availability is an area of knowledge which aims at discovering those words which come
immediately andnaturally to our mind when the conversation turns on a series of stimuli. Our research
focuses on the available vocabulary of two hundred and eighty students from Romanian-Spanish bilingual
primary schools and high-schools (from Bucharest). The main objective of this study is to ascertain
whether the factors ‘gender’, ‘having visited a Spanish-speaking country’ and ‘degree of competence/age’affect lexical availability in Spanish as a foreign language. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of
each of these variables, together with their correlation, brings to light outstanding results whose
explanation can only be found by turning to other disciplines, such as sociolinguistics or cognitive
sciences.

Mots – clés:

l'interdisciplinarité, la disponibilité lexicale,l'enseignement de l'espagnol comme une
langue étrangère, la sociolinguistique, sciences cognitives, lexicostatistique.

Keywords:

interdisciplinarity, lexical availability, teaching Spanish as a foreign language,
sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences, lexico-statistics.

1 Lexical availability
1.1 Introduction
Lexical availability is an area of knowledge which aims at discovering those words whichcome
immediately and naturally to our mind when the conversation turns on a series of stimuli. Our research
focuses on the available vocabulary of 280 students from Romanian-Spanish bilingual primary schools and
high-schools1. In the present study, lexical availability, sociolinguistics, and cognitive sciences “crossfertilize” each other in order to find and explain the quantitative andqualitative effect of the variables
‘level of competence/age’, ‘gender’ and ‘having visited a Spanish-speaking country’ in the lexicon
available to our subjects.
The research questions that we pose are the following:



Is there an associative relationship between ‘gender’ and word production? Is there any relation
between ‘gender’ and the type of words each group produces? At what age is theirlexical
availability more affected by this factor?
Does direct contact with Spanish language and culture have any impact on students’
vocabulary? Which is the most affected age of exposure?

1.2 Studies review
Lexical availability studies began in France, more than five decades ago, in order to advance in the field of
teaching French as a foreign language. French linguists GeorgeGougenheim, René Michéa, Paul Rivenc,
and Aurélien Sauvageot made it clear that frequency was not enough as research criterion, as widely
known and habitually used words presented a very low frequency rate, which hindered their inclusion in an
elementary listing. In Michéa’s view, an available word has a very concrete meaning (dents, métro, roi,
etc.) and, “without being necessarily frequent, it is...