An Empirical Study On The Semantic Fossilization In Chinese College Students' L2 Mental Lexical Development

Lexicon is an essential component of a language and it takes a dominant position in any language acquisition process. Recent years, mental lexicon has become an independent and active area of psycholinguistics and has become one of the most popular research topics in modern linguistic research. Yet the studies on Chinese L2 mental lexicon is still inadequate, especially the studies on the fossilization in Chinese L2 learners'mental lexical development is quite rare. This present study intends to investigate the semantic fossilization in Chinese college English learners' L2 mental lexical development.Nan Jiang points out that L2 learners can not reach the L2 integration stage because they fossilized at the L1 lemma mediation stage. Due to the lack of direct connections between L2 words and mental concepts, L2 learners have to facilitate L2 lexicon acquisition with the aid of L1 translation equivalences. Thus, language transfer becomes the cognitive strategy of L2 word-meaning acquisition. With the repeated and direct activation of L2 words and their LI semantic equivalences, semantic fossilization is then produced.The participants of the present study were 120 Chinese college students who represented four different second language proficiency levels/groups. The main instrument involved in this study was a questionnaire of eight Chinese-English sentence translations which was designed with the aid of two corpuses---CLEC and ECBPC.The analysis of the collected data revealed that Chinese college English learners of different L2 proficiency levels all exhibit the semantic fossilization in their L2 mental lexical development. The response words of the participants were mainly the translation equivalences of the stimulus words, which indicated that the main cause of the semantic fossilization in Chinese college English learners' L2 mental lexical development was the L1 lemma mediation.