A Study On Chinese Children Learners' Mental Lexicon Based On Word-association

This thesis reports on a study designed to examine the different relations within Chinese children ESL learners' mental lexicon. Based on the well-accepted storing and accessing models of mental lexicon, and drawing inspirations from findings of previous word association researches, it intends to describe some storing and accessing features of Chinese children ESL learners' mental lexicon.A carefully designed word association test, using stimuli of 33 familiar words evenly distributed among nouns, verbs and adjectives, was conducted among 58 pupils of Grade Four to Six from seven different primary schools in a region of Zhejiang Province. Three categories of relations, namely paradigmatic relation, syntagmatic relation, and phonological relation, are investigated across the word class line. Both quantitative data analysis focusing on the first response (both in English and Chinese), and qualitative data concerning subjects' retrospections of the association process were adopted. Data analysis revealed the following main findings regarding two aspects, the overall representation of the mental lexicon and the different links between words: (1) Children's English and Chinese mental lexicon share the same conceptual representation and the mental lexicon can be accessed both via concept mediation and word association. (2) The English mental lexicon of Chinese children is rather superficial and unstable. (3) Paradigmatic and syntagmatic link win a predominant percentage over the phonological link, suggesting Chinese children can form a good semantic network with familiar English words based on their experiential knowledge. (4) The phonological link will win over the semantic links when two words share the same beginning and ending sounds. And within the domain of phonological link, monosyllabic words sharing the same beginning sound are more closely linked. (5) Different word classes present different features of semantic links. The link within adjectives is much stronger than that within nouns and verbs, and the verb-noun link is stronger than adjective-noun link. Besides, the influence of language proficiency, children's elementary syntactic and grammatical awareness, and the gap between...