| Lexical items form the prerequisite and foundation for language competence,the essentiality of which in language acquisition is self-evident.Currently,no unified and comprehensive theoretical framework has been proposed for the definition of lexical knowledge and lexical acquisition,and research mainly focuses on the impact of lexical knowledge on the process of reading comprehension among L2 learners.Nevertheless,as text integration is indispensable in reading comprehension,the relationship between lexical knowledge and text integration has been rarely reported.In order to explore lexical knowledge,word identity,word identification,and the relationship among lexical representation,reading and comprehension,Perfetti has proposed Lexical Quality Hypothesis(LQH).Concerning LQH and previous studies,the present study recruited advanced Chinese learners of English as the research participants and adopted the lexical quality assessment and the self-paced reading experiment to investigate the relationship between lexical quality and L2 word-to-text integration processes by analyzing experimental data of target words across sentence boundaries.The main research questions included:(1)Do advanced L2 learners behave differently in lexical quality?(2)What is the relationship between lexical quality and L2 word-to-text integration processes?(3)Is the knowledge of lexical constituents(linguistic form,literacy form and meaning)that affect lexical quality significantly related to L2 word-to-text integration processes?The present study first examined the lexical constituent knowledge of participants to assess lexical quality.SPSS was applied to analyze the data by the independentsamples t-test,repeated measures analysis of variance,correlation analyses and multiple regression analyses.The findings were as follows:(1)There were differences in lexical quality(LQ)among participants with the same L2 proficiency,some of whom were more sensitive to lexical constituents;(2)L2 lexical quality was positively related to word-to-text integration.The L2 learners with higher lexical quality showed the higher efficiency of L2 word-to-text integration processes;(3)Among the three lexical constituents that could affect lexical quality,the results showed no effect of the meaning constituent and the significant effect of the literacy form constituent on L2 word-totext-integration.In the linguistic form constituent,morphosyntactic knowledge exerted greater influence than phonological knowledge.Based on the above findings and combined with the current situation of L2 lexical teaching,the present study made the following recommendations:(1)Reform the methods of English lexical learning and the evaluation system of lexical ability.Lexical quality of English learners must be emphasized;(2)Design corresponding activities for English lexical teaching to enhance the internalization and the combination of lexical constituents. |
