lexical differences

I thought the article from Language Learning this week was really interesting. As I read through the three hypotheses, they seemed very logical to me, so I was surprised when two of them were not upheld by the testing. Particularly, I thought it was interesting that foreign listeners scored better when listening to Southern English than Australian English. I would have guessed the other way around! 

On to lexical differences, though....

Since I have been using the notebook to record misunderstandings, most have them have been due to pronunciation. I have, however, experienced some confusion related to lexical differences. For instance, a Northern-California speaker was confused when I used the word "cook out" to describe what she would call a "barbeque." We were able to quickly resolve the difference, however. I have also experienced confusion when a native Spanish speaker used the word "molested" to mean "annoyed" (the Spanish verb for "to annoy" is "molestar"). Since he was talking about a girl looking "molested" because of something a boy was doing, my interpretation was much different than what he intended. We resolved the confusion by clarifying in Spanish. 

These lexical differences caused problems for different reasons. In the first case, the issue was regional differences in vocabulary. In the second, it was misuse of a word in a second language. For me, the first case has come up far more often than the second, probably because I spend more time around native speakers than non-native speakers.