| In recent decades, second language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) has become one of the hottest areas of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics. The psycholinguistic study of second language acquisition (SLA) has three interrelated aspects: the study of representation, the study of acquisition, and the study of processing. Any theory of SLA is incomplete without a representation component because acquisition and processing cannot be studied independently of representation. However, compared with acquisition and processing, the question of how lexical information is represented in the mental lexicon has not caught as much attention of the researchers as it should have. That explains why we are short of overall understanding of L2 lexical development through which we can discuss the findings of numerous L2 vocabulary studies.This paper proposes how L2 mental lexicon develops, motivated by an understanding of the unique features of L2 lexical representation. The purpose in proposing L2 lexical development is to emphasize the features of L2 lexical representation as an adequate starting point, which may serve to stimulate further research on the L2 mental lexicon, and thus, lead to the bettering of the research on SLVA with great empirical support.This paper is made up of four chapters besides an introduction and a conclusion. In introduction, this paper points out the essential role played by the study of representation in the psycholinguistic study of SLA. It then stresses the important theoretical value and practical value made by the research on L2 lexical representation. The first chapter starts with a brief review of psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical memory. It introduces the notion of the mental lexicon, the internal structure of the lexical entries and the lexical access to the mental lexicon. It then introduces well-accepted common storage hypothesis. Four of the common storage models relevant to the present study are explicitly introduced, namely, Word Association, Concept Mediation, Mixed Representation and Asymmetrical Representation. In the second chapter, this paper provides an account of how L2 mental lexicon develops. A general claim is that lexical development in L2 is fundamentally different from that in L1. The difference is due to two practical constraints associated with L2 acquisition in instructional settings: lack of sufficient contextualized input and the interference of the established semantic and lexical system. Accordingly, L2 lexical development goes through an initial, formal stage, then a second, L1 lemma mediation stage, and a final, L1-L2 integration stage. This paper argues that for most L2 words, the transition from the second stage to the final L1-L2 integration stage is not likely to occur. A majority of L2 words fossilized at the second stage. The third chapter provides some research evidence that is consistent with the above account. The evidence comes from two areas: the study of the bilingual lexicon and the study of L2 production. The paper provides convincing evidence to formulate the three unique features of L2 lexical representation: first, the transition from lexical association to conceptual mediation. L2 learners rely more on lexical association at the beginning stage, but as their proficiency increases, lexical association gives its way to conceptual mediation; second, weak connections between L2 words and conceptual representation due to L1 lemma mediation; third, no morphological specifications at the initial and the second stage means different morphological variants of the same word are represented individually as separate entries. These features, in turn, carry some important processing consequences, notably, higher degree of automatic activation, and a one-step conscious process of morphological production. In the analysis of lexical errors made in L2 production, the paper takes L1 interference as a major cause which leads to word choice and usage errors as well as morphological errors. This paper proves that L1 lemma medi...
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