| Lexical performance, known as free productive vocabulary reveals how profound a second language learner has known a word. Lexical performance in the present study is represented as an ability to use more precise infrequent words. There have been relatively a number of empirical studies on the vocabulary assessing, vocabulary teaching methodologies and learning strategies as well as on the relationship between lexical competence and writing quality, but the results are too mixed to yield a consistent conclusion about how vocabulary size functions in word production across proficiency levels. Meanwhile, study from the angle of mental lexicon, which describes the states of vocabulary acquisition of students at different proficiency levels have rarely been probed into. It seems that vocabulary size or level has some effect on vocabulary use. This is what motivates the present study. Aiming at this, the present study was designed in respect of two dimensions: the receptive versus free productive vocabularies employed in writing in order to examine the relationship between vocabulary size and actual use, and associative vocabularies versus depth of word knowledge with a purpose to portray the development tendency across levels in terms of word response patterns.Thus in this study, the size of passive and active vocabularies of college non-English majors are estimated in order to reveal how or exactly in which way they are related with each other. The subjects of 98 randomly selected non-English major sophomores from three different levels namely, L1 standing for the low level, L2, the intermediate level and L3 referring to the advanced level participated in the study. Three lexical assessing instruments were involved in this study: vocabulary level test, The Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP), and word association test. Also compositions on two different topics were collected and typed into computer for LFP analysis.One-way ANOVA analyses were performed to compare the vocabulary size in each level. Result indicated that the vocabulary size of L3 students was larger than that of the L2s whose vocabulary size was in turn larger than that of the L1s. Low frequent productive words beyond 2,000 in writing among each level were counted by LFP. The outcome presented that with vocabulary size increased at each level, a growing tendency existed in the use of 2nd 1,000, UWL and also the off-list words while a decrease in using the most frequent 1,000 English words in writing. In other words, L3 students used fewer 1st 1,000 words but more 2nd 1,000 and low frequent words than the other two levels.After that a correlation analyses was conducted between the results of words level test and LFP. The results showed that the lexical size of L1 students weakly correlates with the words beyond 2,000 involved in their writing. Compared with L1 students, the correlation of L2 is even weaker. It meant to tell us that for L1s and L2s, there was no absolute increase in their free productive vocabularies as their lexical size increased. For L3 students, the correlation is stronger than the other two levels. In other words, for the L3 students who comparatively have already known a large sum of words, the chance for them to use low frequency words does not seem to be a rather tough mission.A general vocabulary learning pattern is investigated by observing the different word responses in word association test. Statistics showed that about half of the responses from L1 and L2 students are clang-other responses while the students in L3 produced the highest proportion of meaningful responses and the lowest proportion of clang-other responses than that of the other two levels. This well indicates that the lexicon of L1 and L2 students are phonological learned while the mental lexicon of L3 students are semantic in nature.The analyses based on response patterns suggest the different lexical acquisition stages that students of each level stay in and then implications for further word knowledge deepening were presented. Finally, limitations and suggestions for further research were given, with a view to improve vocabulary learning in China.
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