The Effect Of Paraphrase On Restructuring L2 Mental Lexicon

The present study will investigate the effect of paraphrase on restructuring the second language mental lexicon. The psycholinguistics developed greatly in the past two decades, especially, the research into the second language mental lexicon combined the psycholinguistics and applied linguistics closely together and provided a new perspective for the study of the second language vocabulary acquisition. In the second language vocabulary teaching, the explanation of the new words in advance is very important, which can help the learners build a strong relationship between the new words and the learned words. In our foreign language teaching, there are two methods of explanation, i.e. one in native language and the other in target language. The latter refers to the concept of paraphrase in this paper.The paper firstly put forward the strong theoretical bases for the research hypothesis from the aspect of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics and states the significance of paraphrase in restructuring the second language mental lexicon. The process of restructuring the second language mental lexicon is dynamic, not static, so during this process the continuous modification and adjustment of the mental semantic network is the key point of reorganization and it is the main issue to find out which method of explanation can promote the restructuring process and improve the learning efficiency. Then according to this issue, the hypothesis that paraphrase plays an important role in restructuring the second language mental lexicon is put forward.The research shows that paraphrase has a positive effect on restructuring the second language mental lexicon. This viewpoint is built upon the strong theoretical and practical bases. A special teaching experiment is designed for some college students. Two groups of subjects with similar background participated the experiment and they received the vocabulary instruction respectively by different methods of explanation. In order to test the hypothesis and learning efficiency, the subjects attended a special test, word free association test, at the end of the experiment. The result indicates that different methods of explanation have different effects on learners in restructuring the second language mental lexicon. The explanation in the target language or paraphrase, can greatly promote the process of restructuring. The findings proved the hypothesis and also suggested that paraphrase plays an important role in restructuring the second language mental lexicon and improves the learning efficiency, which will be very significant to the second language vocabulary teaching and learning.