Study Of Lexical Development In Second Language Writing

In the field of second language lexical acquisition,research about productive vocabularies has been attracting much attention.Previous studies analyzing second language(L2)lexical development using measures of lexical diversity and frequency have been of critical importance,but they generally focus on surface level of lexical variables,which fail to account for important qualitative information about words,namely word difficulty and more importantly,they do not measure sense relations,lexical associations,and conceptual development.In order to investigate the growing trends of learners’ vocabulary deeply and comprehensively,deeper level indices like concreteness,imageability in this study are essential variables.Besides,studies in L2 using psycholinguistic measures for word learnability were rare.Thus,it is of vital importance to apply psycholinguistic word information to the study of L2 lexicon.By referring to word knowledge scores from the Medical Research Council(MRC)Psycholinguistic Database,the current study examined Chinese EFL learners’ lexical knowledge development in terms of word concreteness,imageability,meaningfulness and familiarity properties in writing as the learners’ L2 proficiency increased.120 writing samples were collected through a year from six L2 learners of English,who were grouped into low,medium,and high proficiency levels.The data of shared words generated from the L2 corpus and the MRC database were analyzed to track the developmental trends or patterns of acquired words as measured by values of concreteness,imageability,meaningfulness,and familiarity derived from the MRC database.Overall,this study has indicated significant tendencies in the development of each of the four word properties for L2 learners.A series of tests have demonstrated significant decreases for concreteness and imageability scores as time spent learning progresses,but no significant changes for meaningfulness and familiarity scores are found over the span.The results have also shown significant decreases for concreteness,imageability,and familiarity scores with the learners’ L2 proficiency increasing,yet no significant differences are found for meaningfulness scores at the three levels of language proficiency.These findings suggest a major step forward in the assessment of lexical development that incorporates depth of vocabulary knowledge(meaningfulness)and core linguistic indices of word(concreteness,imageability and familiarity).