A Wat-based Mental Lexicon Study

Vocabulary is crucial not only to vocabulary learning and teaching but also tolanguage acquisition since vocabulary is the corner stone to any kind of language.With the growing realizations of the importance of vocabulary, more and moreresearchers are devoting themselves to WAT-based mental lexicon investigations.However, previous WAT-based mental lexicon studies always overlook the subjects’different language backgrounds posed possible influences in terms of their respectivemental lexicon structure. Besides, these result-affecting variables such as the promptword’s word class, word frequency and the subjects’ language backgrounds inWAT-based mental lexicon study are rarely explored in one study simultaneously andsystematically. As a result, the present study takes the subjects’ languagebackgrounds (such as mother tongue, EOL and EFL), the prompt words’ wordclasses (such as nouns, adjectives and verbs) and word frequencies (in this studywith high, mid and low totally3frequency degrees) as its main research variables soas to examine their respective influences on the WAT-based mental lexicon study.According to the researching results, the major findings are obtained as follows:(1) The mental lexicon organizations of the three-group subjects with differentlanguage backgrounds are slightly different from each other. With the words inGroup One (English native speakers) and Group Two’s (EOL) mental lexicons aremainly semantically related. While the mental lexicons of Group Three (EFL) arechiefly non-semantically connected, with EFL speakers’ phonological (clang)response patterns taking a greater proportion even than Group Two (EOL), let aloneGroup One (English native speakers).(2) Word class and word frequency both exert different degrees of influences onthe mental lexicon association patterns of the three-group subjects, with theinfluences on the learners of EFL being most obvious, then EOL learners come next.Specifically, with nouns and high frequency words being easier to be activated forall the three groups of subjects, nouns and the high frequency words are most likelyto be semantically related in the mental lexicons because the response patterns ofnouns and high frequent words in the WAT are extraordinary semantic associations.While verbs and the low frequency words are mainly phonologically related,meanwhile, adjectives and the words of mid frequency are just second to nouns and the high frequency words in terms of the amount of their semantically associatedresponse patterns.The above mentioned major findings would offer English vocabularyacquisition with significant practical meanings and provide some possible guidanceand methods. For example, vocabulary acquisition can be improved to some extentby reconstructing mental lexicons’ association patterns and frequent exposure.