Although generalized anxiety has increased among college students, it is unclear what effect this has on language anxiety. While language anxiety has been shown to negatively affect second language achievement, its impact at the level of linguistic subdomains has not been evaluated. The research questions are as follows: 1) What is the relationship, if any, between the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) measure of clinical distress and the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) measure of language anxiety? 2) Which of the two measures, if any, is most predictive of lexical development? and 3) Which of the two measures, if any, is most predictive of morphosyntactic development? An analysis of the results reveals that while language anxiety and generalized anxiety are related, only language anxiety is significantly predictive of both morphosyntactic and lexical development in the context of instructed L2 Spanish, while general anxiety was marginally predictive of lexical development only.
John Grinstead and Holly Nibert are co-directors of the Language Acquisition Lab at the Ohio State University. Sadler Kirk is a master's student in Hispanic Linguistics. They investigate how language develops in typically-developing adults learning a second language and in typically and atypically developing children learning first languages. Their interests center on the representation of human linguistic knowledge, and we investigate the development of these representations in the phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic domains.