A Study On The Mental Lexicon Of English Adjectives In Chinese Learners Of English

With the increase of the studies of vocabulary acquisition in applied linguistics,the focus of the research has been switched from the quantitative accumulation of the vocabulary to the investigation into the constructional features of the deepening lexical network.Therefore, the research on mental lexicon has gradually become an independent and significant field. Meanwhile, many scholars both at home and abroad have carried out researches on the construction, nature and developmental pattern of the mental lexicon.However, most of the researches have been dedicated to L1 mental lexicon, a small number of which have been carried out to explore L2 mental lexicon. In the limited number of the Chinese related researches, attention was put to the comparison of different word classes such as that of nouns, adjectives and verbs. However, for a profound research on adjectives exclusively, the research has relatively larger room to dig into.The present study aims at investigating the construction and representation of the Chinese learners’ L2 mental lexicon of English adjectives with different language proficiencies, including the influence of the adjective types: static adjectives and dynamic adjectives. The three research questions are addressed as follows:(1) Are the English adjectives organized in semantic way in Chinese EFL learners’ mental representation? If yes, what are the characteristics?(2) Does proficiency make a difference in the mental representation? If yes, what is the difference?(3) Does adjective type make a difference in the mental representation of English adjectives? If yes, what is the difference?The subjects of the study consist of two groups, the lower and higher language proficiency group. The former includes 30 non-English majors in Grade One pursuingbachelor’s degree and the latter are 30 postgraduates of 3 different levels of universities(985,211 and the others). The Vocabulary Knowledge Scale and word association test are applied to investigate the mean proportions of the two upper layers of responses: semantic response as well as non-semantic response. Also the sub-categories of the upper layer of two general responses would be analyzed including synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, collocation, semantic adjacent, semantic far-away, inflection, pronunciation-spelling, semantic(non-semantic), coinage, and misjudgment. Besides, comparison between each response type in both groups is also provided. In order to study the influence of the word type of adjectives on L2 mental lexicon, several comparisons between different responses triggered by static adjectives and dynamic adjectives are also discussed respectively with the consideration of language proficiency. Hopefully, it may shed some light on the construction and representation of L2 mental lexicon.Based on a very careful study, the major findings are summarized below.Firstly, the mental lexicon of English adjectives is connected in a semantic way with the same trend of other word classes. But a very outstanding point is that non-semantic response takes up a relatively large percentage of 33.8%. For the specific response types, collocation response and inflection response take up a very large percentage.Secondly, with the increase of language proficiency, semantic response takes up a larger proportion of mental lexicon, which means that there is a positive correlation between the language proficiency and the stability of semantic organization of L2 mental lexicon. For the higher language proficiency group, the collocation response takes up the highest percentage while for the lower proficiency group, the inflection knowledge still plays an important role in their mental lexicon of English adjectives.Thirdly, taking into account of the word type variations, dynamic adjectives produce more semantic responses while the static adjectives arouse more non-semantic responses. But after considering the influence of language proficiency influence, the correlation result shows no significant relationship in between. So language proficiency may only be active in influencing the response results ofadjectives but makes no significant influence on the results of responses with regard to different word types, say dynamic adjectives and static adjectives.Then certain implications for vocabulary teaching are proposed, such as the strengthening of the L2 mental lexicon knowledge, reinforcement of the collocation knowledge, enhancement of word type consciousness, consolidation of semantic network and attention to phonological relation in L2 mental lexicon.