Lexical availability in Matanzas: a study of a corpus from Basic Secondary Education

Abstract

This research examines the lexical availability of 200 Cuban junior high school students using a corpus organized into 23 areas of interest. Objective: To reveal which lexical units are most active in students' mental lexicons in response to a thematic stimulus and how these units are distributed within a school community, in order to identify strengths in the students' vocabulary, areas of dispersion, fields with low familiarity, and sociolinguistic differences that can become teaching resources. Methods: The theoretical methods employed were historical-logical, analysis-synthesis, and inductive-deductive, along with the empirical method of a lexical availability survey. Data processing was carried out using the LexPro platform of the University of Salamanca. Results: The corpus confirms that the students in the sample produce more vocabulary in areas associated with highly familiar daily, bodily, school, and cultural practices. Conclusions: Lexical availability is constructed at the intersection of experience, culture, and learning.