초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This study examined Chinese EFL learners’ word association types in their formation of English mental lexicon. Building on Lu and Lim (2019), where it was found that Korean EFL learners' vocabulary size had a significant correlation with their accuracy in identifying syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations, but not in phonological association, this study investigates Chinese EFL learners’ development of L2 mental lexicon. To this end, the Chinese EFL learners' vocabulary size was tested to see if it had any significant relationship with word association types produced in the tasks of lexical decision task and word association task. The results indicated that Chinese EFL learners' vocabulary size significantly correlated with their response time in identifying paradigmatic, syntagmatic and phonological associations. Overall, their accuracy revealed that paradigmatic association was most frequently activated in their L2 mental lexicon, followed by both syntagmatic and phonological associations. The results showed that L2 learners' mental lexicon was dependent on their vocabulary size of the target language, with variability on word association types. Finally, the study also suggests L1 playing at least some role in developing the L2 mental lexicon.
