An Empirical Study Of The Organization Pattern Of Chinese Senior High School English Learners’ Mental Lexicon

Being an independent and a hot issue in the field of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, mental lexicon research has witnessed many important findings and theories related to the L1mental lexicon. However, studies on the L2mental lexicon, especially on Chinese senior high school students’L2mental lexicon are relatively few. Many questions remain unsettled in the L2mental lexicon studies. Some researchers believe that a better understanding of the internal structure of the L2mental lexicon can shed light on the understanding of the nature of the L2learners’ lexical development, which in turn may provide useful insight into the ways of how words might be studied in L2classroom setting.To achieve the purpose,90Chinese senior high school students from Longmen Senior High School have participated in the word association test. The subjects were randomly chosen from Grade One to Grade Three, who were divided into three groups and each group consists of30subjects. The stimulus words used in the test were carefully selected from the word list in the New Standard English of Book One, which is the textbook the subjects used in the first half of the year in Grade One. These words are familiar to the subjects and represent three parts of speech (noun, verb, and adjective) and two concreteness levels (concrete and abstract). The results of the research show that:(1) Although the L2mental lexicon undergoes a process of reorganization across the three grades, the overall developmental pattern of senior high school students’L2mental lexicon is clang-other responses> paradigmatic responses> syntagmatic responses.(2) Through the comparison with the three grades, it shows a tendency of an increase in the number of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses and the decrease of clang-other responses and no responses with the higher grade.(3) The developmental pattern in the present study also shows that the syntagmatic to paradigmatic shift does not occur in the development of the L2mental lexicon, as Wolter suggests.(4) Words of different classes have different preferences of response types. Nouns can evoke more semantic responses than verbs and adjectives. And nouns can produce a comparable percentage of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses. On the contrary, verbs elicit the highest clang-other responses and adjectives give the lowest syntagmatic responses.(5) Words of different degree of concreteness have different types of response in the L2mental lexicon. Concrete words produce more semantic responses than abstract words and the number of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses are more balanced than abstract words.Finally, on the basis of the research findings, this study could provide teachers and learners with some useful information to help the reorganization of L2mental lexicon and the way of vocabulary teaching and learning strategies.