The Cognitive Analysis Of L2 Mental Lexicon Structure

Mental Lexicon is an important component in linguistics and other cognitive science, among its related researches are the representation and retrieval of words (orthography, phonology, and semantics) in permanent memory. The study of the mental lexicon organization lays some theoretical foundation for the enhancement of second language (L2) vocabulary teaching methodology, and thus promotes the quality of the English teaching and learning.Many psycholinguistists have put forward some models to make a detailed explanation to the organization and retrieval of the mental lexicon, and these models have been testified in some tasks, such as semantic verification task and word association test. Different from the former studies, with 128 subjects randomly selected from Xi'an Technological University, the essay attempts to employ the organization and retrieval models of mental lexicon (especially Spreading Activation Model) to explain the lexical errors in the composition texts, and then make the cognitive analysis of the mental lexicon organization.Based on the frame of the organization model of mental lexicon, this study analyzes errors in three mental lexicon levels-concept level, lemma and lexeme level. The statistics result of the study shows,1) lexical errors in three levels of the mental lexicon show a significant difference,2) there exists correlation between concept and lemma levels as well as lemma and lexeme levels, even through the value of correlation is not very large,3) The lexical errors in three levels show different features. So far as the related variables influencing the lexical access and the linguistic error sources, the paper tells that word frequency effect, semantic complexity and first language (L1) interference are the most important factors to affect L2 vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, some implications are put forward to the different lexicon levels in vocabulary teaching and learning to improve the second language learner's learning proficiency.After the error analysis, the organization of mental lexicon is clearly illustrated-it is composed of concept level, lemma level and lexeme level, and the specifications of each level differ from one another. Thus, at the different stages of the lexical development, emphasis should be laid on different aspects. In a whole, the combination of direct learning and indirect learning is needed, and the relation between context and lexical meaning should be focused on, which will help to build up the semantic network and enhance the proficiency of lexical storage. In vocabulary teaching, teachers have to offer more syntagmatic and paradigmatic practice of new words. They need to distinguish the syntactic difference between synonyms repeatedly to help students' formation of L2 mental lexicon, which will in turn improve learners'quality of adequate L2 output.