Abstract The present paper examines the lexical profiles of children and adult EFL learners in an attempt to untangle the roles of age and hours of exposure and their effect on lexical knowledge. Both age and exposure time have generally been acknowledged as relevant factors influencing foreign language acquisition, and vocabulary learning specifically. Participants in the study, who share the same amount of exposure to the target language but differ in age, were asked to write an informal letter introducing themselves. Their letters were scrutinized and mean production of tokens and types was found together with word frequencies and some lexical inconsistencies. In addition, the children participating in the study were enrolled in a CLIL program to match their hours of instruction with those of the adults. Their lexical profiles are characterized by fewer tokens and types and words of lower frequency related to the fields of school, home and science, the CLIL subject. They also use more cognates and commit more lexical inconsistencies than adult learners, who in turn produce more general words in longer letters. We interpret our results in light of the relevant role of age and instructional program.

中文翻译：

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梳理年龄和接触在 EFL 学习者词汇概况中的作用：儿童和成人的比较

摘要 本文研究了儿童和成人 EFL 学习者的词汇概况，试图解开年龄和接触时间的作用及其对词汇知识的影响。年龄和接触时间通常被认为是影响外语习得，尤其是词汇学习的相关因素。该研究的参与者被要求写一封非正式的信件介绍自己，他们对目标语言的接触量相同但年龄不同。他们的字母被仔细检查，发现标记和类型的平均产生以及词频和一些词汇不一致。此外，参与研究的儿童还参加了 CLIL 计划，以使他们的教学时间与成人的教学时间相匹配。他们的词汇概况的特点是较少的标记和类型以及与学校、家庭和科学领域、CLIL 主题相关的频率较低的单词。与成人学习者相比，他们还使用更多的同源词和更多的词汇不一致，而后者又会用更长的字母产生更多的通用词。我们根据年龄和教学计划的相关作用来解释我们的结果。