An Empirical Study On The Construction Of Chinese English Learners’ L2Mental Lexicon

With the increase of the status of vocabulary acquisition in applied linguistics, thefocus of the research has been switched from the quantitative accumulation of thevocabulary to the investigation on the constructional features of deeper lexical network.Therefore, the research on mental lexicon has gradually become an individual andsignificant field. Meanwhile, many scholars both at home and abroad have carried outresearches on the construction, nature and developmental pattern of the mental lexicon.However, most of the researches have been dedicated to L1mental lexicon. Much fewerstudies have been carried out to explore L2mental lexicon, especially that of the Chineselearners of English.The present study aims to investigate the L2mental lexicon of the Chinese lear ners ofEnglish with different language proficiency, including the influence of the word class.Hopefully, it may shed some light on the construction and representation of L2mentallexicon.The subjects consist of two groups, the low and high language pro ficiency group. Theformer includes100non-English majors in their grade one pursuing bachelor’s degree andthe latter100juniors studying English as second degree in Huazhong University ofScience and Technology (HUST). The word association test is applied to investigate themean proportions of the paradigmatic, syntagmatic, clang-other, misspelling and noresponses, as well as to make comparison between each response type in both groups. Inorder to study the influence of word class on L2mental lexicon, several comparisonsbetween different responses triggered by nouns, verbs and adjectives are also discussedrespectively. With the calculation of SPSS and Microsoft Excel, such conclusions arelisted as follows:Firstly, lexicons with different word classes are connected in a different way. Nouns,verbs and adjectives are fundamentally connected by paradigmatic relation. Comparedwith low language proficiency group, nouns have triggered more paradigmatic andsyntagmatic responses in high language proficiency group; while verbs have triggeredmore no responses in low language proficiency group. Adjectives have elicited evidently more paradigmatic responses in high language proficiency group.Secondly, generally speaking, the L2mental lexicon is semantically related. However,the certain amount of non-semantic responses indicates that although the semanticnetwork of L2mental lexicon has been built it is still unstable and changeable to somedegree. High language proficiency group has produced more semantic responses than lowlanguage proficiency group, which means that there is a positive correlation between thelanguage proficiency and the stability of semantic organization of L2mental lexicon.Thirdly, the paradigmatic responses take a predominant place no matter for whichlanguage proficiency group. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses rise with theincrease of English proficiency, while clang-other responses decrease. The clang-otherresponses produced by low language proficiency group surpass the syntagmatic responses,while for high proficiency group the amount of responses decreases from paradigmatic tosyntagmatic then to clang-other responses. It can be speculated that during the process ofvocabulary integrating into L2mental lexicon, the phonological connection graduallytransforms into semantic orientation.Then certain implications for vocabulary teaching are proposed, such as strengtheningthe L2mental lexicon knowledge, enhancement of word class consciousness,consolidation of semantic network and attention to phonological relation in L2mentallexicon. Also on the basis of the limitations of the present research, some constructivesuggestions are put forward for further studies.