Association In L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

This Ph.D. dissertation is intended to provide an answer to the question frequently encountered by Chinese students of English—"How to memorize more words and how to keep them longer in our minds?" The author has devoted two years to an attempt at finding a more effective learning strategy as a solution to this question. Ultimately, she finds the answer in the cognitive concept of association. Inspired by related previous theories and empirical studies, the author constructs a conceptive construct—an associative lexical network weaving all words in mental lexicon into a tremendous super-network, which is made up of numerous sub-networks.As the core concept in this thesis, association deserves brief interpretation. It is a fundamental idea in cognitive psychology, which means new information comes into human minds by being connected to prior ones. In addition, association not only assists memorization but also paves the way for retrieving the words from mental lexicon when they are needed for application. Anderson, J.R. raises the idea of propositional network in his book entitled Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications published in 1985 that association among propositions facilitates understanding. Therefore, theoretically speaking, lexical network should be able to improve L2 vocabulary learning outcome. Ronald Carter supports this idea in saying that building up lexical networks improves memorization of the lexical items. Although this idea has been mentioned in articles and monographic works, few of them are on this topic specially. Thus it remains to be explored in depth.The author devotes her dissertation to the exploration of this idea. The dissertation is composed of two parts. Part I (Chapters One and Two) first lays theoretical bases for the new model, mainly lexical knowledge and association as a learning strategy. Then it focuses on the interpretation of the new model—associative networks. Part II (Chapters Three to Six) details a series of experiments that are for the purpose of testifying the effectiveness of the new model.Chapter One briefly reviews theories related to vocabulary acquisition, including word knowledge, receptive and productive word knowledge, and evolution of L2 vocabulary...