The Access To The Mental Representation Of The Polysemous Words

Polyserny is a common linguistic phenomenon, which is concerned with many fields such as linguistics and psychology, thus it is of great theoretical and practical value. The critical issues concerning polysemy are how many polysemous senses are accessed to and how they are linked in memory. Researchers, however, have long debated these problems and have set forth three competing explanations:the core-sense representation, the separate-sense representation and the mediated view, but many of these researches treated English as the first language and relatively, there are not enough investigations on polysemous representation in the EFL’s mental lexicon. In addition, more researches exploring the influencing factors on polysemous representation are required.To address these questions, this study adopted Chinese English-majored learners as subjects, hoping to investigate the way how Chinese EFL learners access polysemous representation as well as to explore the factors that would influence polysemous representation. Making full use of the category technology employed in psychological studies (which suggests that the items sharing some common features are placed in the same category), this study investigated access to polysemous representation by testing the meaning relations between polysemous senses. The whole experiment was conducted on the computer with the aid of E-prime Suite. The instrument for the data collection was composed of thirty-five target phrases and two choice phrases. The target phrase used one sense of the polysemous word with one of the choice phrases using the other sense, and the other choice phrase was in taxonomic or thematic relation with the target phrase. All the critical words in the phrases were capitalized. The subjects were required to decide which of the two capitalized words in the choice phrases went best with the capitalized word in the target phrase. Results showed that:1) Chinese EFL learners access the representations of polysemous words in their mental lexicon in a separate way just as the native speakers do; 2) There are four main factors that would have a profound influence on polysemous representation, including language proficiency level, word frequency, relatedness between polysemous senses and lexical category. firstly, with the development of language proficiency, learners access polysemous representation in a more separate way; secondly, there exists a significant "word frequency effect" in polysemous representation. In other words, for those more frequently used words, learners access their senses more separately; thirdly, the influence of relatedness between the polysemous senses is closely related to language proficiency level. With improvement of language proficiency, the mental representation of both the homonymous words and the metaphorical polysemous words is accessed more separately, on the contrary, the mental representation of the metonymical words, experiences an opposite procedure. Learners with higher language proficiency tend to access only one core sense of the metonymical words; lastly, for the representation of polysemous verbs and polysemous adjectives, there is no significant difference witnessed for both have the tendency to be accessed with a core sense, to make a comparison, the senses of polysemous nouns are accessed more separately.Based on the results, this study also gave some suggestions for lexicography and English vocabulary teaching and learning.