A Study Of Vocabulary Errors In College English Writing From Mental Lexicon Perspective

The present research intends to explore the sources of learners'vocabulary errors from the Mental Lexicon perspective. The instrument adopted in this research is Word Association test (WA). Two WA tests with the same stimulus word list are separately conducted on Chinese English learners (the L2 group) in Jilin University and American native speakers (the L1 group) in Fisk University.Typical responses of native speakers and untypical ones are distinguished. And a norm list is formed by recording the frequency of the three most frequently given responses to each word from the L1 group. All the responses given by the L1 group and the L2 group are quantified through a particular tallying procedure. The results reveal that the degree to which a subject's association response(s) are native-like is considered to fall on a continuum instead of being considered as either native-like or non- native-like.Through comparing the different responses of the native speakers and English learners, the psychological reasons for the errors made by Chinese college English learners are explained. A broad view of the L2 group's mental lexicon is depicted as the following: not like the L1 mental lexicon as a continuum, L2 mental lexicon consists of a number of segments; the L2 participants'overall word knowledge partly overlaps with that of the L1 group while the two are not exactly the same. And the factors which result in the Chinese English learners'mental lexicon deficiency are categorized as culture difference factors, instruction factors and course book factors.