A Study Of Chinese Learners' L2 Mental Lexicon

This paper attempts to testifythe three different viewpoints concerningL2 mental lexicon—the phonological view, the semantic view and thesyntactic view, using the models of mental lexicon organization and lexicalaccess as the theoretical data base and the word association test as theresearch instrument. Therefore, the research focuses on the following threeaspects: (1) the major linkingdevice of Chinese learners'L2 mental lexiconorganization; (2) the similarities and disparities of responses provided bysubjectsofhighschoolEnglishgroup,thecollegeEnglishgroupandcollegeJapanese group; (3) the roles that language proficiency and vocabularyfamiliarityplayinorganizingL2mentallexicon.Through the comparison of all subjects'responses to twenty stimuluswords in free word association test, the following conclusions can bereached.First, regardless of the different language proficiencies, all subjectstendtoadoptthesemanticlinkinorganizingthelexicalitemsinmind,whilethe phonological link is used as a backup system when the semanticactivationbetweenwordsfails.Second, distinctive characteristics are revealed in three groups'responses to word association test. The high school group produces quite anumber of phonological responses by simply adding the suffixes to thestimuli; college English participants unconsciously give responses of thesame word class as the stimuli; college Japanese group's responses are tosome extent, influenced by the language itself. On the whole, the common feature of the responses is that the more familiar the stimulus words, themoreresponsesareproducedwithinalimitedtime.Third, the overall language proficiency and the depth of vocabularyknowledge exert influence on the organization of L2 mental lexicon. On theone hand, as the L2 learners'general language proficiency develops, theproportion of semanticallyassociated words increases while the coverage ofphonologically linked lexical items drops. On the other hand, new worditself undergoes an integrating process into the whole network of L2 mentallexicon.Drawn from the theory of L2 mental lexicon and the findings of thisstudy, some pedagogical implications for second language teaching are putforward, such as using phonological knowledge as facilitation during theinitial vocabulary acquisition stage, helping L2 learners consciouslyreorganizingsemantic network of L2 mental lexicon and puttingvocabularyacquisitionincontext.