| Just as Wilkins (1972:9-10) stated,"While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed." As an important part in the language learning, Vocabulary has attracted much attention. With the increasing status in second language teaching and research, the influences on psycholinguistics are spreading, which mainly concerns the storage and retrieval of words, but mostly on L1lexicon. Recently, especially from1980s, many researchers began to pay attention to L2mental lexicon. The previous studies have presented that L2mental lexicon is significantly different from L1mental lexicon on organization, access, nature, developmental features and so on. Some relevant theories and methods were just transmitted to China in1990s. Actually, it has made great progress, while there are also many inconsistent points about L2mental lexicon at home and abroad. The word association test is also questioned for its subjects and response types.Based on the previous theories and research, the present study attempts to investigate the word association patterns and features in the different stages (junior middle school students, senior middle school students. Non-English majors and English majors) of EFL learners’ mental lexicon by word association test. What’s more, it tries to know how the association patterns vary with word class, concreteness, and frequency. It also aims to find out the developmental way of the association type.The results shows that:(1) The L2mental lexicon is a mixture of semantically-related associations and non-semantically related associations, and there are increasingly more and more semantic responses with increasingly proficiency;(2) Nouns, adjectives, concrete words and high frequency words all tend to elicit more semantic responses. The proportion of SR associations increase as proficiency improves. Then the author puts forward several ways for vocabulary teaching and learning, hoping to help the second language learners. |
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