| Since the 1970 s,researchers have begun to use the word association test to study the organizational structure of the L2 mental lexicon.Research results have been quite rich,but the previous studies paid little attention to Chinese L2 learners,especially the Chinese L2 learners of ethnic minorities.Chinese learning is not only related to the self-development of ethnic minority students,but also affects their identification with the country,the development of national economy,stability of society,and the improvement of national soft power.The word class is an important factor affecting the word association patterns of L2 mental lexicon.Using a free word association test,the present study tries to explore the word class effect on the Chinese mental lexicon of Yi students and its developmental features.252 Yi students from Yuexi County,Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture,Sichuan Province have been recruited,including 80 students from grade four in a primary school,87 students in grade seven in a junior high school,and 85 students in grade ten in a senior high school in Yuexi County.The 108 word stimuli used in the test were words used frequently in modern Chinese and were all selected from a word frequency list downloaded from an online corpus of modern Chinese language built by the National Language Committee,with the word frequency,word class and concreteness being strictly controlled.The participants were required to write down the first Chinese word that came to their minds when they saw the stimulus word.After the Chinese word association test,participants’ association responses were classified and analyzed using one-way ANOVA and chi-square test.The findings are as follows:(1)Syntagmatic,paradigmatic,encyclopedic and phonological associations were the main types of word association in Yi students’ Chinese mental lexicon for all word classes.The Chinese word association of the three types of words was dominated by meaning-based associations and supplemented by form-based associations.But compared with previous studies,the phonological associations produced by Yi students accounted for a relatively higher proportion,while the proportion of meaning-based associations was relatively low.(2)The determinative,layer,adjacent and indicative associations were major types of word associations of nouns,whereas the governing and adjacent associations were the major types for verbs.As for adjectives,the major association types were determinative,reverse,adjacent and fixed phrase.(3)From primary school to senior high school,indicative and determinative associations for nouns continued to increase steadily;governing and fixed phrase associations for verbs continued to increase steadily.But for adjectives,only the fixed phrase association increased steadily.The results of this study have important implications for the Chinese education of Yi students.Firstly,high frequency Chinese words teaching should be set as one of the primary goals for Chinese education in primary and secondary schools.It is necessary to strengthen vocabulary teaching and increase the depth and breadth of students’ vocabulary knowledge so as to help students build developed Chinese vocabulary networks.Secondly,as phonological association is an important means for students to construct their Chinese vocabulary networks in the initial stage,teachers can cultivate students’ awareness of phonological similarity by discriminating homonyms to help students build primary vocabulary networks through phonological associations.As students’ language learning progress,semantic associations should be gradually promoted to replace phonological associations so as to build complex and stable semantic networks.Thirdly,efforts can be made to promote the construction of the layer and adjacent associations of nouns,the adjacent association of verbs,and the determinative,reverse and adjacent associations of adjectives in vocabulary teaching.The three-layer classification framework of the L1 Chinese mental lexicon constructed by Zhang and Chen(2018)is also suitable for analyzing the patterns of the L2 Chinese mental lexicon.However,the numbers of sequence and supplement associations at the third layer produced by participants were very small,which can be excluded. |
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