The question's ambiguous because it's not well formed (with all due respect to the OP). Consider the following:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @a = (2, 4, 6);
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The array elements in the above array are 2, 4 and 6. Can 2 be used as a loop iterator? $a[1] is not an array element. One assumes that $a[1] is the referent of the phrase "array element," but that assumption requires disambiguating the OP's use of that phrase.