Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Lexical Failure And Gesture In Second Language Development, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

Second language acquisition can be defined as the acquisition of another language after the age of three or four (Klein, 1986). It involves the learning and mastery of the morphology, syntax, phonology, and lexicon of the new language. The process by which learners acquire a second language is complex, gradual, nonlinear, and dynamic (Larsen- Freeman, 1991). Depending on their stage of second language development, learners may have difficulty retrieving words, or they may not know words at all and exhibit lexical failure.

Butterworth and Hadar (1989, 1997) have proposed that iconic gestures arise when speakers have a lexical retrieval problem …