Research Into The L2 Mental Lexicon Based On Word Association Test Of Logistics Words

Word Associations have traditionally been used in linguistic research as a means of accessing information about the organization of the mental lexicon. However, the traditional way of selecting the stimulus words and classifying the responses has made the L2 mental lexicon studies come to a "dead corner".By using the logistics words as the stimuli and a more precise way to classify those responses, the study reported here aims to investigate the patterns of professional word associations in the Chinese English language learners'mental lexicon in order to find how professional words are organized in the L2 mental lexicon, and how association patterns vary with different types of words.36 stimulus words related with the logistics field are firstly selected by building up a corpus. A new way of classifying responses was represented by combing Zhang (2009) and Fitzpatric's (2005) model and each subject has received a retrospective interview to keep all the response words are precisely classified.55 Logistics and International Trade majors participate in the test. All the data have been classified and analyzed.Three major findings are as follows:1) The overall pattern of L2 mental lexicon with professional words as the stimuli is a mixture of non-SR (semantically-related) and SR associations. However, unlike the L2 mental lexicon using the common words as the stimuli, the organization of L2 mental lexicon about professional words are closer to that of the L1 which means professional words are stored in a more native like way.2)Professional L2 mental lexicon is organized both paradigmatically and syntagmatically as the logistics majors produced a comparable proportion of responses in terms of ParaR (paradigmatically-related) and SynR (syntagmaticlly-related), which resembles the L1 mental lexicon.3) Word class effect do have an effect on the professional L2 mental lexicon but not as strong as that on the common L2 mental lexicon. Concreteness effects are not so obvious in the professional L2 mental lexicon as in the common L2 mental lexicon and the L1 one. Abstract words can elicit nearly as many meaningful non-SR responses and SR responses as those concrete words in the professional L2 mental lexicon. Both the high and low frequency professional words generate an overwhelmingly larger proportion of SR connections than that of the non-SR responses. With the increase of frequency, the participants generated less ParaR responses to high frequency words than to words of low frequency.Theoretically, these findings enrich the understanding of the nature of L2 mental lexicon by choosing professional words as the stimuli. Methodologically, it has proposed a new dimension (pragmatic point of view) to explore the L2 mental lexicon which was never used in those previous studies. Pedagogically, this study provides both professional English teachers and students with necessary information to help better use of vocabulary teaching and learning strategies.