A Study Of The Structural Features Of The Chinese Mental Lexicon Of Foreign Students

Mental lexicon refers to the permanent representation of vocabulary knowledge stored in our memory.Exploring the structural features of mental lexicon can help us to understand the process of vocabulary acquisition of foreign students.Therefore,the word association test was used as a research method in this paper to explore the mental lexicon structure of 40 intermediate students,25 advanced students and 53 high school students.The structural characteristics,the similarities and differences of the mental lexicon among the three were analyzed.At the end of this paper,some relevant teaching suggestions have been put forward.The results show that:(1)In terms of language proficiency,the differences among levels has an impact on the structure of the subject’s mental lexicon.For the first category,semantic response is dominant in the mental lexicon of students at different levels.However,there are significant differences between semantic response and non-semantic response.For the second category,most of the students from intermediate group give priority to syntagmatic response.Group at advanced level account for almost the same proportion in syntagmatic response and paradigmatic response.Most of the students from native speakers’ group are tend to produce paradigmatic response.The proportion of native speakers producing paradigmatic response is higher than that of speakers at middle and high level.For the third category,these three groups are dominated by nearness relation in the paradigmatic subclass and definite relation in the syntagmatic subclass.(2)In terms of part of speech,when the stimulus word is noun,verb and adjective,most of the subjects produce paradigmatic response.In addition,when the stimulus word is adjective,the proportion of paradigmatic response is higher than that of the nouns and verbs.Part of speech also exerts an effect on sub-classification.When the stimulus word is noun and adjective,most of the subjects produce the response of nearness relation and the response of definite relation.When the stimulus word is verb,most of the subjects produce the response of nearness relation and the response of domination relation.(3)In terms of word frequency,when the stimulus word is high-frequency word,intermediate-frequency word and low-frequency word,most of the subjects produce paradigmatic response.Word frequency has no great influence on the part of speech.But word frequency exerts an effect on the response of subjects at different levels,which is specifically reflected by changes in the sum of the proportions of paradigmatic response and syntagmatic response and in the proportion of irrelevant response.