The structure of English lexical knowledge of Japanese college students (Japanese text)

The main purpose of this study is quantitatively and qualitatively to contribute to a better understanding of Japanese students' mental lexicon in English. A total of 89 Japanese college students translated 800 English words into Japanese on a translation test and rated their confidence of knowing each of the test words on a five-point scale. There were five such tests, and responses to 4,000 English words were collected for analyses. The percent correct and the mean degree of confidence were taken as reflecting the ease of learning/processing of each word, and were analyzed to describe the English lexical knowledge of the subjects.; Analyses of the data are as follows. First, a by-subjects analysis of the number of correct translations was conducted to estimate the subjects' English vocabulary size. On average, the subjects knew about 2,700 words. Second, a by-items analysis using various factors revealed that percent-correct data correlated significantly with the degree of confidence, word frequency, word familiarity, age-of-acquisition, meaningfulness, concreteness, and imagery. The effects of these factors combined were found to account for nearly 60% of the knowledge of the subjects' English lexicon. Third, the nature of the error responses were analyzed and discussed. Important findings include the nature of "competitors" which induce errors. Moreover, some of the errors seemed to assume the characteristics of deep dyslexic errors. Fourth, translation processing of English words (N = 60) was compared between spoken and written modes, using the present data and those from a previous study by the author. Results indicated that spoken word translation was more difficult than written word translation due to increased difficulty in word identification, while they correlated significantly. Finally, the processing of isolated words and words in context were analyzed and discussed. It was found that they correlated significantly, but the processing of words in context was much easier than that of isolated words. Possible sources of the context effects were proposed.; In summary, this study presented and analyzed the ease-of-learning/processing values for 4,000 English words and reported several findings. These data could profitably be used in the field of teaching English to Japanese students.