Exploring The EFL Mental Lexicon Of University Students In Chinese Context

Standing out as an independent subject and a hot issue, the research of the mental lexicon has witnessed dozens of important findings and theories related to the L1 mental lexicon (e.g. Gunstone, 1980; Eivin, 1960; Deese, 1965; Aitchson, 1994). And some researchers (e.g. Meara, 1982; Marechal, 1995; Singleton, 1999; Namei, 2004; Wolter, 2001) have conducted studies concerning the nature of the L2 mental lexicon. The foreign researches involve profound study of mental lexicon, yet the study of L2 mental lexicon in Chinese context has been ignored. Recently, Chinese scholars began to investigate Chinese English learners'mental lexicon. Some of them (Gui Shichun, 1992; Yang Yiming & Cao Ming, 2000; Gao Liqun, 2003; Zhang Jinchu, 2005; Zhao Cunlian, 2005, Dong Yanping 1998) explored the mental lexicon in the various prospects. They have attempted to reveal the nature EFL mental lexicon and great progress has been achieved in this field. However, the more empirical studies are needed. There have been no such multidimensional studies that investigate the nature of L2 mental lexicon.This paper investigates the patterns of word associations in the EFL mental lexicon of university students in Chinese context. It aims to explore how the association patterns vary with different types of words and frequency. 90 undergraduates in Far East Institute of HUST have participated in the study. The test materials include sixty English words which are chosen from Nation's Word Frequency Lists (1990) representing three parts of speech (noun, verb, and adjective), the level of frequency (high frequency and low frequency) and two concreteness levels (concrete and abstract). The experimental is independent samples one factor design. The analysis of statistic is"t-test"and analysis of variance. The application software is SPSS (the Statistical Package for the Social Science software). The previous studies of mental lexicon mostly used correlation analysis which could show the degree of common variation between two variables. While in this paper, the analysis of statics could explain the differences degree. That is, it could test the significance of difference degree of two variables. The method of the previous studies uses expressive statistic, this study mainly used infer statistic.The major findings have emerged from the research: compared with L1, the semantic association of the EFL mental lexicon is significant difference, separately in the levels of frequency, the concreteness levels and the parts of speech. The research will advance the mental lexicon study in Chinese context and then supply a new perspective—by activating the passive EFL mental lexicon. Hopefully, it would bring some significance for pedagogy to guide EFL teaching and learning. Based on the present study, further research with qualitative analysis can be undertaken in the further investigation.