Lexical items have been regarded as the most salient components of meaning in any meaningful utterance of language. From among millions of words in the English language, those which share some formal, functional, or semantic characteristics, or those derivatives of the same root belonging to the same part of speech (for instance, pairs such as economic/economical, historic/historical, vulnerable/venerable, hard/hardly, use/usage, and so forth) seem to be more demanding and challenging for the EFL/ESL learners to learn than other words. Such similar lexical items have come to be known as \\\"synforms\\\"—a coinage proposed by Laufer (1988)— in the literature. Faced with such words, EFL/ESL learners generally experience difficulty to make a distinction between the delicate shades of meaning conveyed by each member of such pairs. On the other hand, research findings on the issue of similar lexical forms indicate (for example, Laufer, 1991; Hulstijn & Tangelder, 1992) that there seems to be some relationship between EFL/ESL learners\\\' language proficiency level and the number of errors they make on such lexical items. In this study, the researcher administered a couple of tests on similar lexical forms to two groups of undergraduate EFL learners, all majoring in fields other than English (n=60), to measure both their recognition and production of similar lexical forms against their linguistic proficiency level in English. The participants had already been arbitrarily categorized as ‘the higher proficiency’ and ‘the lower proficiency’ groups, on the basis of the results of a proficiency test they were given by the researcher.

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