Exploring The Network Of Bilingual Mental Lexicon Through The Word Association Tests

The essential aim of the present study is to explore the nature of the bilingual mental lexicon through word association tests and what such a nature tells us about L2 vocabulary acquisition.It is commonly believed that mental lexicon is organized in semantic fields as well as in phonological fields, and in the L1 mental lexicon, there are strong semantic links between the words, so the basis of the operations of the L1 mental lexicon is semantic. However, as far as the question to the nature of L2 mental lexicon is concerned, though many efforts have been made, the study in respect of its structure and organization of representations does not suffice to provide a conclusive answer yet. The aim of the present study is attempting to clarify the tangle. The research questions are: (1) Are the learners'responses in the written-written word association test different from those in the aural-written word association test? (2) Is the bilingual mental lexicon semantic in nature? (3) What kind of sense relations will be significant in the L2 mental lexicon of Chinese learners of English (CLE)? (4)What are the characteristics of the lexical information in the L2 mental lexicon of CLE?To test the research questions, an experiment composed of two forms of word association tests was carried out to the two balanced experimental groups of 58 subjects correspondingly, and a simplified word knowledge scale test was made at the same time. Through analyzing the subjects'response types, the study reveals that L2 learners produce more paradigmatic responses, which means that L2 mental lexicon is also semantic in nature for Chinese learners of English, and that semantic links become stronger and stronger as learners become more familiar with a word; that L1 and L2 have their own separate formal representations, but share a common conceptual meaning; that L1 mediation still plays a dominant role in the L2 mental lexicon of the present L2 learners; and that separate storage of morphological information and existence of improper or meaningless links in the L2 mental lexicon imply that the L2 mental lexicon has to be restructured.Besides, by comparing the data collected from the two forms of the written-written word association test and aural-written word association test, the study proposes that more reliable semantic information about the network of mental lexicon can be acquired in the written-written test.The findings of the study provide some implications for pedagogy that L2-L1 translation still plays an important role in the vocabulary acquisition, and that the L2 mental lexicon of learners needs to be restructured.