A Study Of Chinese English Majors' Second Language Mental Lexical Semantic Relations

As vocabulary plays an important role in the teaching and learning of second language,and mental lexicon is an independent and hot topic in the field of psycholinguistics,study on the semantic relations of second language mental lexical has attracted more and more attention from scholars.In terms of the study of the first and second language mental lexical,many scholars both at home and abroad have conducted the studies on the nature,organization and developmental pattern of mental lexicon,and many important theories and findings have been made.However,compared with the studies on the semantic relations of first language mental lexical,there are relatively fewer studies on the semantic relations of second language mental lexical.Moreover,in the few studies on second language mental lexical,the focus is mostly on the study of the organization of mental lexical and the participants employed are usually with the same language proficiency.The 80 participants employed in this research were all from a Normal University in Northwest China,majoring in English.Participants of the study consisted of two groups: the lower and the higher language proficiency group.The former included 40 sophomores and the latter were 40 seniors.The stimulus words in the word association test in this research were selected from the reference book Four Level Vocabulary for English Majors,including 8 nouns,8 verbs and 8 adjectives.This research uses word association test to explore the features of the semantic relations of second language mental lexicon of Chinese English majors at different levels and the effects of word class on the semantic relations of second language mental lexicon.The sub-categories of semantic relations include synonyms,antonyms,hyponyms,semantic neighbors,semantic remote relatives and collocations.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the features of L2 mental lexicon semantic relations of Chinese English majors at different levels?(2)Do the different word classes affect L2 mental lexicon semantic relations of Chinese English majors?(3)Do the effects of word class on L2 mental lexicon semantic relations of Chinese English majors change with the improvement of L2 proficiency level?The results show that: firstly,the level of second language proficiency affects the semantic relations of second language mental lexicon of Chinese English majors.Semantic relations of students in low language proficiency level group are significantly lower than those of students in high language proficiency level group.Especially,the antonyms and collocations of students in low language proficiency group are significantly lower than those of students in high language proficiency group.Secondly,different word classes have great effect onsecond language mental lexicon semantic relations of Chinese English majors.The semantic relations of nouns are significantly more than verbs' semantic relations,but the semantic relations between nouns and adjectives as well as between verbs and adjectives are not significantly different.Moreover,in the semantic relations of synonyms,verbs are significantly higher than nouns.Adjectives are significantly higher than verbs in the semantic relations of antonyms and hyponyms.And in the semantic relations of hyponyms,nouns are significantly higher than adjectives and verbs.Thirdly,with the improvement of second language proficiency level,the semantic relations of nouns,verbs,and adjectives all change significantly,which indicate that the effects of word class on second language mental lexicon semantic relations of Chinese English majors have changed significantly.Especially in different second language proficiency groups,synonyms,antonyms,semantic neighbors and semantic remote relatives of nouns,synonyms and collocations of verbs,synonyms,antonyms,semantic neighbors,semantic remote relatives and collocations of adjectives have changed significantly.It is implied in the present research that in vocabulary teaching,both English teachers and English learners should pay attention to the importance of semantic connection of vocabulary and ultimately improve students' English lexical competence.