Word Association Patterns In The Mental Lexicon For Chinese Learners Of English As Second Language With Different Levels Of Language Proficiency

Word association patterns of mental lexicon is one of the key issues in second language acquisition research. Knowing more about language users’ associative connections through empirical study may help to reveal the word association patterns in the mental lexicon of L2 learners with different language proficiency levels. The present study is an attempt to explore the word association patterns and network in L2 mental lexicon to provide pedagogical suggestions for second language vocabulary acquisition.Specifically, this research addresses the following questions:1. What are the general patterns of word association in the mental lexicon for the L2 learners with different language proficiency?2. What are the relationships between L2 learners’ language proficiency and the word association patterns in terms of paradigmatic responses and syntagmatic responses?The results find that: 1) for the semantically-associated and non-semantically associated responses( including “zero response”), the proportions of semantic associations increase with the improvement of L2 proficiency, and the non-semantically associated responses( including ”zero response”) will drop relatively. 2) For the semantically-associated responses, there exists a significant difference between the two groups with different levels of language proficiency. Comparably, the high-proficiency L2 learners evoked more paradigmatic responses, thus indicating, during the L2 language learning, the L2 learners are developing their paradigmatic knowledge faster than their syntagmatic knowledge.From the results, we may conclude that: 1) the word association knowledge is an important aspect of the L2 mental lexicon, and that in the L2 vocabulary instruction, attention should be paid to the semantic connections between the L2 lexical items, to help students to memorize and use the second language words through semantic association in the hope of facilitating the establishment of L2 lexical semantic network. 2) for the L2 learners, especially those at intermediate and higher level of language proficiency, more attention need to be paid to such measures as the exposure and practice of the collocation and associative words via reading, listening, as well as speaking, and most importantly, L2 language is needed for the memorization of the L2 lexical items instead of the L1 translation equivalence, thus helping the students to enhance and strengthen the interconnectivity between the L2 mental lexicon.