An Empirical Study On The Construction Model And Feature Of Chinese English Majors' L2 Mental Lexicon

Vocabulary has always been the focus of second language acquisition.With the rise of psycholinguistics,people began to explore vocabulary acquisition from the perspective of psycholinguistics.Therefore,the research of mental lexicon has gained popularity.It has gradually become independent and active research highlight in the domain of vocabulary acquisition.Many scholars both from home and abroad have carried out the researches on the nature,organization,representation and other aspects of mental lexicon.They have made abundant achievements in those respects.However,most of the scholars focus their attention on the research of L1 mental lexicon.Very few studies have been carried out to explore L2 mental lexicon on its construction model and developmental features,especially on that of Chinese English learners.The thesis firstly reviewed mental lexicon studies,including theoretical and empirical studies of the L1 and L2 mental lexicon and especially the most commonly used approach to the exploration of mental lexicon—word association tests.Then the author investigates the L2 mental lexicon of Chinese English learners at different language levels.Three groups with different language proficiency participate in the experiment.They are freshmen,juniors and first-year graduates who major in English in Xinjiang University.The word association test was dedicated to investigate the mean proportions of the paradigmatic responses,syntagmatic responses,encyclopedic responses and clang-other responses,as well as making comparison between and across each response type in three groups.Microsoft Excel and SPSS 17.0 were applied to calculate and analyze the data.This synchronic study discovered the construction model of L2 learners as follows:Although certain proportions of clang-other responses exist,there are more and more semantic responses while clang-other responses become fewer and fewer with more new words learned and integrated.Generally speaking,the subjects made steady progress in an ever-advancing direction in the four response types.Or to put it another way,they made more semantic responses as time went on.There are some construction features of four response types.In semantic responses,synonyms show the most occurrences among different types of paradigmatic responses in the three groups;with the development of language proficiency,subjects are more inclined to produce idiomatics and conventional collocations;all the groups produce a certain number of encyclopedic responses.In the features of non-semantic responses,phonology occupies the largest proportion.Even in the responses of subjects with high language proficiency,there still exist a certain number of phonological responses.It indicates that phonological response plays an important role in the organization of L2 mental lexicon.With the development of language proficiency and the increase of vocabulary knowledge,there are fewer and fewer phonological responses.It shows that phonology is the primary stage of L2 acquisition.In addition to the above,this study also proves the existence of “bathtub effect” which shows that language learners remember the beginnings and ends of words better than the middles.Based on this study,some suggestions of vocabulary teaching are put forward.Firstly,teachers should focus on vocabulary teaching,concerning the influence of word frequency.Secondly,teachers should pay much attention to the building of semantic network.They are expected to help language learners consolidate semantic connections.Thirdly,the disturbance and interference of native language should be avoided in the process of L2 vocabulary acquisition.Finally,the limitations and suggestions are established.Hopefully,they may contribute to the further study in this field.