| A variety of literature in bilingual research area has supported the Developmental Hypothesis as discussed in Kroll and Groot (1997). This hypothesis proposed a developmental shift from lexical to conceptual processing in L2 with the increasing of L2 expertise. Specifically speaking, there is a shift from the reliance of L1 knowledge to understand L2 lexicon for early English learners, to the direct understanding of L2 knowledge for the advanced English learners.This hypothesis indicates the shift in mental lexicon, so there is a need to investigate the factors which influence this process. The importance of a good understanding of the bilingual mental lexicon can be seen in the suggestion that expanding and activating learners'L2 mental lexicon may be one of the factors to success in acquiring a second language.L2 vocabulary knowledge has been regarded either as an important component of L2 lexical competence (Henriksen, 1999), or as constituting part in L2 lexical competence (Nation, 1990), which has been viewed as the heart of communicative competence (Meara, 1996c). Therefore, a fundamental assumption of the present study is that L2 vocabulary knowledge has a crucial effect on access to the semantic knowledge represented in the L2 mental lexicon. More specifically, the present study attempts to investigate the relationship between L2 vocabulary knowledge and the retrieval of that knowledge represented in the L2 mental lexicon, particularly the effects of L2 vocabulary knowledge on access to L2 word meanings.The present study is intended to investigate the influence of L2 vocabulary knowledge level to the semantic retrieval of mental lexicon in Chinese English Learners. Based on the L2 vocabulary Knowledge hypothesis, which postulated that L2 vocabulary knowledge level would affect the efficiency of L2 semantic retrieval for Chinese learners of English, with adult Chinese-speaking learners of English as subjects, this study aims to answer the following three questions: (1) How does L2 vocabulary knowledge influence semantic retrieval among Chinese English learners? (2) Will different priming conditions affect the results of semantic retrieval? (3) Will different L2 vocabulary knowledge levels and priming conditions cause an interactive influence on the efficiency of semantic retrieval?To this end, two questionnaires and one experiment have been carried out within a conceptual framework of L2 lexical competence which based on the frameworks of Chapelle (1998), Meara (1996a, 1996c) and Nation (1990) which was specially developed for the current research. The first questionnaire of the Controlled Active Vocabulary Test was administrated to determine their L2 vocabulary knowledge level, the second questionnaire was conducted to control the semantic relatedness for stimuli in the following experiment, and then a primed lexical decision task was used to assess the learners'efficiency of L2 semantic retrieval.The results showed that the learners with high L2 vocabulary knowledge level were significantly quicker and more accurate than that of those with lower L2 vocabulary knowledge level regarding the retrieval of semantic knowledge in the L2 mental lexicon. Thus, the results supported the hypothesis of L2 vocabulary knowledge proposed by the author. We can make it possible to conclude that L2 vocabulary knowledge is a key factor in the development of efficient conceptual retrieval in a second language and this obviously provides a new perspective on the issue of a developmental L2 mental lexicon.
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