A Comparison Of Word Association Between Native Speakers And L2 Learners

This paper explores the similarity and difference between L1 and L2 mental lexicon, with a developmental model which assumes that depth of individual word knowledge and breadth of word knowledge determines a given word's degree of integration into the mental lexicon. It also investigates the L1 influence in L2 vocabulary acquisition.Three tests, the Word Association Test (WAT), the Depth of Individual Word Knowledge Test (DIWK) and the Vocabulary Levels Test (VL), are applied in this study. And 13 Chinese English learners and 5 English native speakers participated in the tests. The result shows that, L1 and L2 mental lexicon are structurally similar in the light of depth of word knowledge. As revealed by WAT and DIWK, for the words that are not well known, both native and nonnative speakers make more clang or other non-sensible responses than semantic responses. While for the well known words, semantic responses become predominant. Yet L1 and L2 mental lexicon still differ in that nonnative speakers tend to produce more clang responses than native speakers do. Breadth of word knowledge also plays some role in structuring the mental lexicon. For the well known words, more semantic responses are made by the participants who have a larger vocabulary size, either native or nonnative speakers. However breadth of word knowledge is proved not significantly related to the difference between L1 and L2 mental lexicon. Lastly, the study also reveals that L1 influence to some extent does affect L2 vocabulary acquisition and may therefore weaken the semantic connections between the L2 words.Chapter 1 and 2 include the general introduction of the paper and a review of the evidence relevant to the research question. Chapter 3 and 4 presents the design and results of an investigation comparing nonnative and native speaker response patterns. Chapter 5 discusses some problems found in the tests and Chapter 6 is a conclusion of the whole paper.