An Investigation Of Chinese English Learners' L2 Mental Lexicon

The present study was intended to investigate two factors relating to the organization of L2 mental lexicon. The first factor has to do with language proficiency, which is assumed to affect the organization of L2 mental lexicon of learners with different language proficiency levels. The second is concerned with depth of individual word knowledge, which is believed to determine the storage of a particular word in the L2 mental lexicon.The participants in this study were 30 high school English learners, 30 university sophomores, 30 university seniors and 12 native speakers. All the English learners were Chinese and represented 3 levels of English proficiency—the low level, the intermediate level, and the advanced level. The elicitation instrument was a guided word association test and a depth of individual word knowledge test.Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data collected revealed the following major findings:1. Language proficiency is related to the organization of L2 mental lexicon. With the increase of language proficiency, the proportion of clang-other responses and no response showed a tendency to decline. On the contrary, the rate of semantic responses (paradigmatic responses plus syntagmatic responses) tended to increase with the increase of language proficiency. However, the increase rate slowed down slightly from the intermediate level to the high level.2. Depth of individual word knowledge constitutes a fundamental factor that affects a word's connections with other words in the mental lexicon. Results of the study show that as words come to be better integrated into the mental lexicon, they form associations in a systematic way: initially these are predominantly phonological, while later on, as words come to be better understood, associations become predominantly semantic, either paradigmatic or syntagmatic. For...