A Study On The Word Association Patterns Of Chinese Senior High School Students’ L2 Mental Lexicon

The mental lexicon can be reckoned as the mental space for storing lexical knowledge.The word association pattern of the mental lexicon is one of the hot issues in the field of psycholinguistics.Most existing studies on the second language（L2）word association patterns attach attention to undergraduates or graduates,while less attention has been paid to middle school students.Exploring the word association patterns of middle school students’ L2 mental lexicon is conducive to investigating students’ lexical knowledge and can provide guidance for L2 vocabulary teaching.Thus the study has been designed to explore the word association patterns of Chinese senior high school students’ L2 mental lexicon.The word association test has been employed in the study.The 30 stimulus words of the test consisted of 10 nouns,10 verbs and 10 adjectives.In each group of the same lexical class,5 concrete words and 5 abstract words were included.In the test,participants were asked to give three responses to each stimulus word within certain time.The participants were 153 students from three grades in a senior high school who were divided into three groups according to their school years.A total of 12177 responses were collected and 12165 responses were left after the deletion of pseudo words.The responses were classified into different types according to their relations with their stimulus words.The responses were first divided into three types:meaning-based responses,form-based responses,and erratic responses.The mis-perceived conditions and chain responses were outside the scope of the study.The meaning-based responses included three types: paradigmatic responses（synonymy,antonymy,co-hyponyms/co-ordinates,hyponymy,and meronymy）,syntagmatic responses（modifying,predicate-object,complement,manner/ locative/temporal responses,instrument,subject-predicate,proper nouns/compounds,and the structure of linking verb-predicate）,and encyclopedic responses.The form-based responses included three types: phonological or orthographical responses,derivative responses,and inflective responses.The research questions are as follows: 1)What are the overall patterns of word association in Chinese senior high school students’ L2 mental lexicon? 2)Are there differences in L2 association patterns among the senior high school students of different grades? If so,what are the differences? 3)Dose word concreteness affect L2 association patterns of senior high school students? If so,how does it affect the association patterns?The findings are as follows: 1)Chinese senior high school learners’ L2 mental lexicon is mainly semantic and supplemented by form-based relations,with plenty of erratic associations.Within the meaning-based associations,paradigmatic responses and syntagmatic responses are generally balanced.Among the paradigmatic associations,the relations of co-ordinate are the strongest,the synonymy ranking the second,and the meronymy is the weakest.With respect to the syntagmatic associations,the modifying relations are the strongest and the relations of predicate-object are the second.The structures of linking verb-predicate can be negligible.In terms of form-based associations,students rely more on the phonology/orthography than the derivative associations,and inflective associations are the fewest;2)Except the inflective responses,there is no significant difference in the association patterns of the L2 mental lexicon of students from different grades.With respect to meaning-based responses and the erratic associations,the distributions of all types of responses by the three grades of students are almost consistent.In regard of the form-based associations,the inflective associations by grade two are the strongest,grade three ranking the second,and those by grade one are the weakest;3)To a certain extent,the word concreteness has effects on the word associations of senior high school students’ L2 mental lexicon.In terms of the number,the responses elicited by concrete words and those by abstract words are basically equal.However,in terms of the distributions of responses,concrete words are more likely to elicit meaning-based responses than abstract words（73.01% Vs.43.42%）.While abstract words are more likely to elicit form-based responses（17.45% Vs.8.07%）and erratic responses（39.12% Vs.18.92%）.In regard of paradigmatic responses within semantic associations,the co-ordinate relations of concrete words are significantly stronger than those of abstract words,and the synonymy of abstract words is significantly stronger than that of concrete words.In regard of syntagmatic responses within semantic associations,the proportion of manner/locative/temporal responses to concrete words is ten times higher than abstract words.With respect to form-based responses,the inflective relations of concrete words are stronger,whose proportion is nearly six times higher than abstract words.While the derivative relations of abstract words are stronger,whose proportion is over four times higher than concrete words.The findings of this study provide some enlightenment for the L2 vocabulary teaching in the context of class instruction.It is believed that during vocabulary teaching,teachers should both try to enlarge students’ vocabulary and help to construct the semantic network among the words in the mental lexicon.