A Study Of Mental Lexicon Inlfuence On Vocabulary Output For Non-English Majors From The Perspective Of Cognitive Psychology

In the study of second language vocabulary acquisition, the researchers pointout that: lexicon or lexical knowledge acquisition is a continuum which is made upof different dimensions and levels, rather than the simple dichotomy course of"acquisition" or "not acquisition","know" or "not know". Therefore, vocabularyacquisition research should answer learners not only the question about which wordslearners know, that is, the number of vocabulary acquisition; but also focus on howwell learners know these words, that is, the depth of mental lexicon knowledge.The studies of Gui Shichun et al.(1992) prove that mental lexicon is a hugestructure and well organized system, rather than unordered scattered stuff which arestored in the long-term memory of people. The language knowledge it contains ismuch richer than that in the dictionary. Mental lexicon is a system in whichpronunciation, meaning and number can be changeable. Wolter (2001:41) proposedthe Depth of Individual Word Knowledge Model, because he attempted to describethe substance and process of second language vocabulary acquisition through thestudy of the state of mental lexicon. It not only expands the field of the study tovocabulary acquisition theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology, but alsohas some instructional significance for vocabulary learning and teaching methods. Interms of the empirical research on the depth of word knowledge, the foreignresearchers started experimenting with deep processing as the training method todeepen word knowledge. In view of that nowadays the existing training of deepprocessing mainly direct at word meaning, and currently there is few training studyfor deepening word knowledge in our inland, hence, this paper attempts to take thestudies on mental lexicon and related theories of cognitive psychology as thetheoretical basis, to adopt Wolter's Depth of Individual Word Knowledge Model as the theoretical framework, and to use the basic principles of word knowledgeprocessing training which has been existing abroad for reference to design theexperiment of this paper, in order to obtain some effective methods which can bothimprove teachers' teaching mode of English word knowledge and promote students'competence of second language acquisition and vocabulary output. Because of somesubjective and objective constraints, the writer investigates the influence of mentallexicon on vocabulary output from two aspects: long-term retention and vocabularyoutput.In order to verify the effectiveness of deep processing training, the writerteaches ten target words by using deep processing training method of wordknowledge in the experimental group; while teaches the same target words by usingtraditional method in the control group. After vocabulary teaching one week and onemonth, the writer do two tests respectively to the two classes. The results show thatthe experimental group has better effect than the control group both in vocabularyoutput and long-term retention. It reflects that the conscious training of wordknowledge is helpful to the vocabulary output and long-term retention, and furtherindicates that deep processing training is a suitable training method for teachingsecond language in Chinese classroom context.