A Study Of The Nature And Development Of Non-English Majors' Second Language Mental Lexicon

As an important part of psycholinguistics,mental lexicon becomes an important field in studies.The studies mainly focus on the nature,organization or factors that influence mental lexicon.Compared with L1 mental lexicon,the studies on L2 mental lexicon are inadequate.Besides,the studies on the L2 mental lexicon mainly employ English majors as participants,and only a few are about the non-English majors.Employing vocabulary knowledge scale test,word association test and interviews as the research instruments,the present thesis intends to explore the following questions:1)What is the nature of non-English majors' L2 mental lexicon?2)How does non-English majors' L2 mental lexicon develop?3)How does word class influence the organization of L2 mental lexicon?To solve the research questions,30 freshmen and 30 juniors who are non-English majors from Shandong University of Science and Technology(Qingdao Campus)are chosen for word association test.Other 30 non-English majors from the same university take part in the vocabulary knowledge scale test,and at last 30 words with higher frequency are selected.Taking word class into consideration,the final stimulus words include 10 nouns,10 verbs and 10 adjectives.The study analyzes the proportions of paradigmatic response,syntagmatic response,encyclopedic response,clang-other response and no response which are given by participants from two grades,and compares each proportion between two groups.Besides,there are comparison of responses evoked by stimulus words with different word classes.Through the analysis of responses,the following findings are obtained.1)Non-English majors' L2 mental lexicon is mainly organized in a phonological way. In word association test,non-semantic response takes up a larger part in the responses of participants from two groups.2)As the time of participants' English learning becomes longer,the nature of participants' L2 mental lexicon is still mainly phonological,but the proportion of semantic response gets larger.3)Word class influences non-English majors' L2 mental lexicon.Nouns evoke the most semantic response among three word classes.For semantic response,nouns evoke more paradigmatic response while adjectives evoke more syntagmatic response.Based on these findings,suggestions for better vocabulary acquisition and teaching are given from the perspective of learners and teachers.Learners should learn to use association,have enough input and output and try to rely on L1 less.Language teachers should help learners reorganize their L2 mental lexicon,and use different teaching strategies in teaching vocabulary in different word classes.