L2 Vocabulary Knowledge Acquisition: An Investigation On Semantic And Syntactic Knowledge Of Verbs

The lexicon of a language is assumed to be of great importance to language acquisition as it mediates language production and comprehension, which are crucial to language acquisition. Verbs, as an important class of natural language, are rich in the aspects of configuration, grammar, collocation and semantic. At present, relatively few studies have assessed the relationship between semantic and syntactic knowledge of verbs in L2, while the majority of research has focused on breadth of vocabulary knowledge. This study takes an integrated approach to investigate the relationship of semantic and syntactic aspects of word knowledge for verbs in English as a foreign language (EFL) using instruments from vocabulary and grammar acquisition research. In total, 96 senior non-English majors at Ocean University of China participated in this study, who studied English as a foreign language, and they all had passed CET-4 test. According to their achievements on the CET-4 test from high to low, subjects are divided into two groups, namely proficient group and less proficient group with the top 35% and the bottom 35% respectively. Three instruments were chosen for conducting the investigation, Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) (Nation, 2001) measures each subject's breadth of vocabulary knowledge; Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) (Wesche and Paribakht, 1996) measures each subject's depth of vocabulary knowledge; Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) measures each subject's ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing verbs tested on the VKS. Scores of vocabulary size from the Vocabulary Levels Test were compared with scores on the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale, a measure that required learners to demonstrate semantic and grammatical knowledge of 24 verbs from three lexical frequency levels. Grammatical knowledge of the same set of verbs was further explored in terms of four syntactic features using a grammaticality judgment test.The results indicate that subjects showed knowledge of fewer words than predicted by their vocabulary size, particularly for higher frequency words. Furthermore, subjects were more likely to judge a sentence accurately if they were also familiar with the meaning of the verb. This held true in the case of three of the four syntactic features investigated. However, subjects were unable to form grammatical sentences with many of the verbs they knew semantically. In contrast to the variation in the results for syntactic accuracy, subjects consistently expressed greater confidence in their judgments of sentences containing better known and higher frequency verbs.