An Analysis On The Characteristics Of Chinese English Learners' English Mental Lexicon

Vocabulary is considered as an essential component of languages,and it plays a very important role in language acquisition.Nowadays,vocabulary is gaining more and more attention on the second language teaching and learning,and there is a growing amount of studies on L2 mental lexicon.Through the researches of the L2 mental lexicon,it can reveal the internal features of second language vocabulary learning,and facilitates the vocabulary learning in turn.However,the studies which aim at Chinese English learners' mental lexicon are still inadequate,and there are few studies on the effect of the depth of individual vocabulary knowledge on the response patterns of Chinese English learners.Through free association test and a test of depth of individual word knowledge,this study aims to investigate the characteristics of Chinese English learners' English mental lexicon and the effect of the depth of individual vocabulary knowledge on the response patterns of Chinese English learners.Participants include 60 Chinese English learners,30 of whom are postgraduates who major in English,while the other 30 are freshmen who are not.They are considered to represent high and low language proficiency learners.The results show that:(1)there is a paradigmatic dominance in high proficiency group,while a non-semantic dominance in low proficiency group.Words acquired by high proficiency groups are semantically related in their mental lexicon,but words are non-semantically related in low proficiency groups' mental lexicon.However,compared with native speakers,the semantic relation of Chinese English learners' mental lexicon is much weaker because of the intervention of the existing semantic and lexical systems.(2)The depth of word knowledge is closely related to the response patterns of Chinese English learners.For unknown words,subjects tend to make large amount of non-semantic responses while they still could make a tiny proportion of semantic responses based on their existing vocabulary knowledge.Although vocabulary knowledge of slightly known and moderately well-known words is not deep and solid enough,the number of them in subjects' mental lexicon is so significant that we cannot ignore.Moreover,the phonological relation has being dominant with the increase of semantic relation which makes the relation of these words to be the most unstable in their mental lexicon.For well-known words,there is an obvious increase in number of the semantic responses.However,there is still a large amount of non-semantic responses even in high proficiency group,which indicates that even well-known words have not been established strong enough semantic relations.In the end,suggestions would be given to promote Chinese College English vocabulary teaching and studies of Chinese English learners' mental lexicon in the future.