An Empirical Study Of Word Class Effect And Its Developmental Features In Non-english Majors' L2 Mental Lexicon

With Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon having been published,the research on mental lexicon has been increasing day by day at home and abroad.However,the research mainly focuses on mother tongue's mental lexicon.Until Meara(1985)took the lead in developing word association test into second language acquisition,learners' second language(abbreviated as “ L2 ”)mental lexicon has begun to draw more and more attention.The research on L2 mental lexicon have mainly concentrated on the organization patterns since 1980 s,but the conclusions of different studies are contentious.There are three main views in academia: phonological view,semantic view,syntax view.Because the L2 mental lexicon cannot be seen or touched,it is difficult to give a qualitative conclusion.For recent two decades,some researchers in China have become more and more interested in word-related factors,such as word class effect,word frequency effect,word concreteness effect and so on that can affect the development of L2 mental lexicon.Based on the previous analyses about word class effect of L2 mental lexicon,the author tries to explore the word class effect and its developmental features of non-English majors' L2 mental lexicon.In order to complete the study,word association test and interview are used.The data show that:(1)In non-English majors' L2 mental lexicon,nouns and adjectives induce most paradigmatic responses while verbs induce most syntagmatic responses.(2)Both syntagmatic responses of verbs and adjectives increase while phonological and other responses decrease from low to high proficiency group.Paradigmatic responses of verbs decrease quickly than nouns and adjectives.In the interview after word association test,the methods of learning English vocabularythat subjects used in their daily study and the methods that some English teachers usually adopted in English vocabulary lessons were learned.The data of two tests and the feedback information collected in the interview are combined to give some vocabulary teaching and learning suggestions in order to help learners promote the efficiency of vocabulary learning and teachers improve their vocabulary teaching methods.