A Study Of The Relationships Between The English Words' Frequency Effects And Their Semantic Associations

With the English sharing more and more importance in the second language teaching, the vocabulary teaching and learning become an indispensable component. The writer considers the vocabulary teaching and learning should take two aspects into consideration: the vocabulary itself & the learners' acquisition. Recently, the focuses of vocabulary lie in the investigation of the learners. But the investigation of vocabulary itself as an important side did not receive the consideration as it merited.In the investigation of the acquisition of learners, the mental lexicon is an important part. The researches show the frequency effect and semantic association of words. That is, in the access of mental lexicon it is the high frequency word could be easily accessed, and the words have been accessed tend to be semantically associated. But the explanation of the finding is limited and abstract. The inner mechanics of frequency effect and semantic association have not been mentioned and the instruction to the vocabulary teaching and learning is deficient. So the writer wants to investigate the property of language itself.The most concerned issues in the thesis are: Whether the semantic association exist in vocabulary or not; To what extent the words connected to each other; The frequency effect of vocabulary and its mechanism; The relationship of semantic association and frequency effect; Using the finding to promote and facilitate vocabulary acquisition.The writer's works in this thesis included: 1) Constructing a synonymy-antonymy semantic network based on the words' semantic association in semantic field. 2) Using the Ucinet (Borgatti, 2002) software made a statistical calculation on the property of the semantic network. 3) Explaining the relationship of frequency effect and semantic association of English words in mental lexicon, the conclusion of the experiment in the semantic network will be testified in the A General Service List of English Words (West, 1977). 4) Demonstrating the semantic associations of words and explaining the space of words from another aspect - the complex network theory, trying to make the finding serve the English vocabulary teaching and learning.This thesis made descriptive analysis and correlative analysis on the property of semantic network, the semantic association and frequency effect. The results of the thesis are mainly based on mathematic calculation. Through the investigation the writer found semantic association did exist in semantic network, meanwhile the words in the network is closely related. The space between any two words in the semantic network is only 4 steps. In the semantic network there are some word connected with more words than other words and the status of these words in the network is more important than others.After the quantitative analysis with A General Service List of English Words (West, 1977) the writer found most of these high degree words are the high frequency words. The appearance of high frequency words are due to the inner relation of vocabulary: the semantic association. The frequency effect of words in mental lexicon accessing is just skin-deep phenomena; the inner semantic association of vocabulary is the deep-seated reason. At the end of the thesis the writer discussed the learnability of word.