The Analysis Of "Language-Thinking Bilingual Double Structure" On The Vocabulary Level From The Perspective Of The Distinction Between Chinese And English College Students On Mental Lexicon Organization

Vocabulary is a most important part of language and plays a great crucial role in the language learning and teaching process. The sufficient understanding of vocabulary is necessary to understand and express one language well. As we all known, there is a close relationship between language and thinking. Furthermore, language bears a close relationship with the brain activity and psychological process of human being. As to the lexical level, the study of mental lexicon can be the best reflect pattern of the relationship between language and thinking. While for the Chinese adult English learners, many researchers pay great attention to the issue whether their mental lexicon of Chinese and English are stored together or separately. However, the present study sets its sight on the simplex English mental lexicon and aims to reveal the English mental lexicon structure of Chinese adult learners by comparing to that of English native speakers.Supervised by the chain of"Reality-Cognition-Language"proposed by Wang Yin (2007) and based on the theoretical foundation of Chinese adult learners'special psychological mechanism of Bilingual Double Structure put forward by Professor Yin Demo (2005) from Xihua University, this thesis explores the mental lexicon and the realistic differences between native speakers and Chinese learners at the theoretical level. The main spirit of Bilingual Double Structure is the hypothesis that there are multidimensional and multi-level cross-role interactive relationships among the language-knowledge structures and thinking-cognition structures of the mother language and foreign language existed in Chinese adult learners'brain during the process of their English learning. Then with 15 English native students in London University and 30 Chinese students from Xihua University including 15 English major seniors and 15 non-English major freshmen as its subjects, the research also empirically studies the differences on the mental lexicon organization between English native students and Chinese students as well as the influence of English proficiency on the organization of Chinese students'mental lexicon. The experimental results are handled with SPSS 19.0.With both qualitative and quantitative analysis, the experimental results are as follow:1. There are systematical differences on the English mental lexicon structure between English native speakers and Chinese adult learners. Specifically, the mental lexicon organization of English native speakers is mainly semantic link, while the words in Chinese learners'mental lexicon even at high proficiency level are connected in various ways, none of which is at a prominent position.2. English proficiency affects the connective styles in Chinese adult English learners'mental lexicon. Generally speaking, as the English proficiency improved the mean proportion of the clang links decrease rapidly, on the contrary, the semantic connection increases.3.Chinese adult English learners'mental lexicon is a dynamic network of lexical connection with the improvement of English proficiency. During this procedure, their mental lexicon structure is influenced by Chinese thinking and language all the time.On the basis of the results of theoretical and experimental research, the model of Language-Thinking Bilingual Double Structure on the Vocabulary Level is established, and the relationship of language and thinking on the lexical level is briefly discussed. There are also some pedagogical implications emerged to help the vocabulary teaching and learning effectively, that is, it is necessary to take the different vocabulary teaching strategies towards Chinese adult learners at different proficiencies to guarantee their own improvement. Generally speaking, as for the high level learners, the teacher should emphasizes the depth of vocabulary knowledge scale, by arousing their motivation of further learning to construct the semantic network among the different meanings within the same lexical entry. While towards the low level learners, the most important point is to help them widen the scope of word association to enlarge their vocabulary scale and strengthen their understanding of words via different illustrative means rather than the single translation.