An Experimental Study On Mental Representation Of Polysemous Words Of Chinese EFL Learners

Harmer(1990)pointed out that if we compare language structure as the sketch of the language,vocabulary is the thing that provides important organs as well as blood and flesh.According to Britton(1978,1),more than 32%of the words have at least two meanings in English.Therefore if Chinese EFL learners want to master English,it is very necessary for them to learn polysemy well.This paper aims to research mental representations of polysemous words of Chinese EFL learners.The research will enrich and develop the polysemic psychological representations theory and make a contribution to the development of second language teaching and learningPolysemy is a focus in psycholinguistics.Scholars at home and abroad made many researches about it.However,there still exists controversies of mental representation of polysemous words in the academic and three perspectives are formed.They are core-sense representation,separate-sense representation and mediated views.These views are based on the researches of native speakers.At home,scholars hold a developmental view about EFL learners' mental representation of polysemy.They find that with the improvement of Chinese EFL learners' language proficiency,their mental representation of polysemous words develops from core-sense to separate-sense.Apresjan(1974)divided polysemy into two categories:symmetric polysemy and asymmetric polysemy.The paper adopted this classification and made a research about mental representation of symmetric polysemy and asymmetric polysemy.The first research question is how different senses of polysemy are represented in the memories of EFL learners generally.The second one is what the differences of polysemous representations between high and low proficiency EFL learners are.The third one is what the differences of polysemous representations between symmetric and asymmetric polysemy are.The last one is how the word frequency influences the representation of polysemous words.This paper conducted an experiment with the aid of E-prime.Sixty college students from a north-eastern university attended the experiment and those who had passed the TEM 4 are regarded as high-level group subjects.And in this experiment 30 polysemous words(15symmetric polysemous words and 15 asymmetric polysemous words)were selected.These subjects sat before the screen,they first saw a '+' to attract their attention,200ms they saw the target phrase,and 750ms later two alternative phrases appeared and the key word in these three phrases were capitalized.Subjects then decided which of the two capitalized words in alternative phrases was more close to the one in target phrase.The research results are represented as follows.Generally speaking,EFL learners' polysemous mental representation is in a separate-sense representation model,for 23%polysemous phrases were chosen during the whole experiment;with the developmental of EFL learners' language proficiency,their polysemous mental representation model develops from core-sense to separate-sense;symmetric polysemous mental representation is in a core-sense representation model,while asymmetric polysemous mental representation is in a separate-sense representation model;as for word frequency,the higher the word frequency is,the less the percentage of polysemous choice is.Percentage of polysemous choice of the highest frequency words is 12%which is the lowest.It means that words frequency influences polysemous mental representation.Based on the results,this thesis had some implications on English learning and teaching and gave some suggestions about future researches.