This chapter examines the lexical availability of students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes how their semantic networks change as their proficiency in Spanish increases. The analysis focuses on 150 students with different levels of proficiency and the two centres of interest: "acciones y actividades habituales"…

This study explores prototypical word associations in EFL learners' mental lexicon to determine how they categorize the words retrieved in response to prompts in a lexical availability task. We compare two groups of Spanish EFL learners: sixty children in the sixth grade of primary education and sixty adolescents in the ten grade of secondary…