Exploring The Second Language Mental Lexicon: How Are Words Connected In L2 Learners' Mind

This dissertation reports a study undertaken to investigate how words are connected in the mental lexicon,how strong these associative links are,and how these associative links vary with a number of word-related factors and learner proficiency.It also probes into the possibility that response behavior gleaned from multiple-response word association might differ from that obtained from single-response association.One hundred and twelve students took part in this study,including 26 native speakers of English from the USA,and 28 native speakers of Chinese,and 26 advanced EFL learners and 32 intermediate EFL learners.The L1 and L2 English participants finished a multiple-response association task that had 24 stimulus words balanced on lexical class,frequency of occurrence,and degree of concreteness.The L1 Chinese participants also completed the association task in the Chinese version.The response data were subsequently coded and classified,with the help of WordNet and BNC,into paradigmatic responses,syntagmatic responses,encyclopedic responses and form-based responses.The association strengths were obtained by running Lexidisp,a software program to compute the lexical availability index.Data analysis generated interesting findings:1)L1 and L2 English mental lexica are basically organized in a similar fashion.Lexical connections can viewed in two dimensions,i.e.,quantity and strength.In terms of quantity,encyclopedic connections far outnumber paradigmatic responses and syntagmatic responses.In terms of strength,paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections are activated more quickly than encyclopedic connection.2)Despite their overall resemblance with native speakers of English,the L2 lexicon is significantly less syntagmatically organized than that of English native speakers.It takes longer for L2 learners to retrieve collocational responses than native speakers.3)Words of different properties are organized in different ways in both the L1 and L2 English lexicon.Adjectives are more paradigmatically related tan nouns and verbs.High-frequency words are more syntagmatically related than low-frequency words.Concrete words are related less paradigmatically but more syntagmatically than abstract words.These findings partly concur with those by Zhang(2011a,2011b)regarding word-type effects upon lexical connections.4)L2 learners make greater progress in accumulating paradigmatic knowledge than syntagmatic knowledge.This lends support to Zhang's(2009)finding related to L2 lexical development.5)With the number of responses on the increase,the possibility for paradigmatic responses to occur would steadily decline,that for syntagmatic responses would remain the same and that for encyclopedic responses would steadily increase.The findings have important implications for lexical acquisition.They point to the need for L2 learners to restructure their lexical network,allocate more attention and efforts to syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic knowledge and build strong collocational connections between lexical entries for efficient retrieval.All of these needs urge both EFL teachers and learners put lexical development in a new perspective and make changes to traditional vocabulary teaching and learning strategies.