Lexical difficulties in the acquisition of German

Abstract

This study is focused on interference-related errors in German students' written papers. These errors are caused mostly by the differently structured non-linguistic reality, which results in asymmetries of language signs. Mistakes occur particularly in polysemous words, words with different semantic ability to combine, fixed phrases, and prepositional phrases. Concerning foreign words, interference-related errors arise from their asymmetric occurrence in the mother and the target languages, and also from their different meanings in both languages.