Disponibilidad y riqueza léxica en un grupo de estudiantes universitarios italianos de ELE

This thesis, framed within the areas of Applied Linguistics and Didactics of Spanish, investigates lexical availability and lexical richness in a group of Italian university students learning Spanish as a FL. The theoretical framework consists of Proyecto Panhispánico de Disponibilidad Léxica, involving native Spanish speakers, pioneering works of Carcedo (2000c) and Samper Hernández (2002) that dealt with non-native Spanish learners and the latest findings of Sánchez-Saus (2011), Hidalgo (2017b) and Del Barrio y Vann (2018). It was designed an associative test which allowed to conduct a linguistic-statistical survey on the available lexicon of informants through a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. This test focuses on the vocabulary produced by respondents when prompted with stimuli and collects their mental lexicon. In addition, it was included a further test for measuring and evaluating lexical richness, which required the writing of a short narrative text that was examined on the basis of standard indexes (Read, 2000). The experiment aims to be an innovative project which deals with the complex phenomenon of lexical competence, combining two complementary methodologies capable of ascertaining the participants’ language proficiency and knowledge of Spanish vocabulary. Results of the quantitative, qualitative and comparative analysis of data led to significant new considerations arising from the combination of lexical availability and lexical richness merged for the first time in a single study. Moreover, the transverse and longitudinal approaches brought about a renewal of the research method in this field, which so far was solely based on cross-sectional studies.