Los efectos de la pandemia de Covid-19 en el léxico disponible de alumnos de ELE de la Universidad de Oporto

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on various areas of society by promoting changes that have also been reflected in the use of the language. Taking these studies as a starting point, the main objective of this research is to analyse the footprint that COVID-19 has left in the lexical availability output of a group ofSFL students from the University of Porto (N = 20), after the first and third waves of the pandemic, which hit Portugal with different intensity. In this sense, it seemed relevant to us to study whether this conjunctural disparity had been reflected in the lexi-con activated by the informants when the «COVID-19» prompt was indicated to them at two dif-ferent times (September 2020 and March 2021). To find out, we applied a total of 40 psycholin-guistic tests to the group, using the methodology of lexical availability.