L2 Mental Lexicon Research Articles

A Study on the Role of Mental Lexicon in Teaching Movie English

The purpose of this study is twofold: firstly, to investigate whether memorization is improved if the L1 mental lexicon (in this case, Korean) is dependent on the L2 mental lexicon (English), or vice versa; secondly, to observe whether L1 and L2 lexicons stay in the same state or whether they remain in different modular conditions. To do this, a case study was undertaken with four college students. Two participants (A and B) had a beginner level of English and two (C and D) had an intermediate level of English. Two movies were used for this study. A similar procedure was performed on both levels. Recall tests of 50 items were administered to both levels. The results showed that participants A, B, and C were successful in memorization and recall, but participant D was unsuccessful. The suggested reason is that A, B, and C depended on the L1 lexicon whereas D depended on the L2 lexicon. It turns out that the primary use of L1 lexicon was effective for memorization. For the second question, it is proposed that less proficient students have a close integration of L1 and L2 lexicons, and that more proficient students have more separation of L1 and L2 lexicons.

Categories of Word Association in L2 Mental Lexicon of Chinese EFL Learners.

Categories of Word Association in L2 Mental Lexicon of Chinese EFL Learners.

Effects of Silent English Sentence Reading Training on Processing Formulaic and Non-Formulaic Sequence Knowledge in the L2 Mental Lexicon

Effects of Silent English Sentence Reading Training on Processing Formulaic and Non-Formulaic Sequence Knowledge in the L2 Mental Lexicon

Morphological Decomposition in L2 Arabic: A Masked Priming Study.

Previous findings indicate that the way words are organized in the mental lexicon may differ in Arabic and English. While words are organized according to both orthographic and morphological form similarity in English, they are organized primarily according to morphological form similarity in Semitic languages (Frost et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 23:829-856, 1997; J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 31:1293-1326, 2005). The purpose of this study was to determine whether L1 English learners of L2 Arabic organize their L2 mental lexicon so that they show nativelike patterns of lexical activation, and whether this depends on proficiency level. Native speakers of Arabic, intermediate-proficiency, and advanced-proficiency learners completed a masked priming, lexical decision task in Arabic. Response times were measured to target words preceded by primes that were orthographically or morphologically related, identical, or unrelated. Results showed that native speakers and L2 learners patterned alike regardless of proficiency level.

二语与三语心理词库联结模式对比研究

二语与三语心理词库联结模式对比研究

Korean EFL Learners’ L2 Mental Lexicon: Vocabulary Size and Word Association Types

This paper examined factors affecting Korean EFL learners’ word association types in their L2 mental lexicon. Specifically, vocabulary size of the learners was examined to see if it had any significant relationship with word association types. To this end, experiment procedures that included vocabulary size test and the lexical decision task as well as the word association task were conducted on 40 Korean EFL learners. Reaction time and accuracy of responding to word associations in the lexical decision task were measured. Subsequently, a correlation analysis was conducted with their vocabulary size. Additionally, learners’ word association types were analyzed based on the results of word association task. The results showed that Korean EFL learners’ vocabulary size had significant correlations with their accuracy in identifying syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations, but not in the phonological association. However, their accuracy was not correlated with reaction times. The results indicate that L2 learners’ mental lexicon is partially dependent on their vocabulary size of the target language, and it is variable depending on word association types.

An Interlanguage Study of L2 Mental Lexicon

This interlanguage study examines the L2 mental lexicon of Thai EFL learners with different degrees of language exposure- i.e., the high exposure group and the low exposure group. The scores from the English Language Exposure (ELE) Questionnaire were used to select the two groups of participants. To explore the lexical processing and the organization of the mental lexicon, two psycholinguistic tasks were employed: lexical decision task (LDT) and word association task (WAT). The LDT was used to investigate the semantic priming effect of the prime on the target words which in this study are the frequently cooccurring words or the lexical collocations of the verb + noun in the Thai learners of English with high and low exposure to English. The results exhibit that the collocational processing is faster than the noncollocation. However, the difference is not outstanding. The WAT (McNeill, 1966) was conducted to investigate the organization of L2 learner’s mental lexicon or the association between the words prompted and their networks. The findings indicate that the L2 mental lexicon is mostly meaning-based. The majority of links between words in the mental lexicon engages meaning and concept. The results support the interlanguage phenomenon that the two groups of participants have different mental lexicon and different paths of lexical access. The learners with high degree of language exposure tend to have the stronger links between English words in the lexicon than the learners with low exposure. The high-exposure learners produce more meaningful responses than the low-exposure learners do. The production of phrases and chunks by the high-exposure learners is considered a characteristic of native speakers. On the other hand, the production of the low exposure group exhibits the L1 transfer found common in EFL learners.

Word Association Responses in L1 and L2 to the Chinese Word Yueliang (Moon): Implications for L2 Vocabulary Instruction

A mental lexicon refers to the stored knowledge of vocabulary in one's mind. Representation of the mental lexicon is usually obtained through a word association test. A majority of the literature in mental lexicon studies has employed such word association test and focused on the response types to compare mental lexicons in first language (L1) and second language (L2) through responses to stimulus words. This study investigates the response types and detailed response items in Chinese L1 and L2 by focusing on one stimulus word yueliang, which means ‘moon’ in English. The findings lend support to the semantic view among the three standpoints presented (semantic, syntactic and phonological) that L2 mental lexicon might be mainly organized by semantic links. The detailed response items in Chinese L1 and L2 have been carefully studied and implications for L2 vocabulary instruction have also been discussed.

理工科学生的二语心理词汇组织模式研究及意义

理工科学生的二语心理词汇组织模式研究及意义

A Note on Densities of the L2 Mental Lexicon Network

In this note, we discuss a supplementary explanation about works of Takahashi and Tanaka, which are a kind of replication study of Wilks & Meara (2002), where they discuss the structure of learners’ mental lexicon network from the viewpoint of psycholinguistics. Here we mainly discuss some mathematical structures which support their studies latently. Using some simple random graph techniques, we propose that the role of “densities” is important and useful under some suitable assumptions. Then, we exhibit the effectiveness of our method by applying it to the data of experiments in Takahashi and Tanaka, where some inequalities obtained mathematically help us to investigate some of the aspects of the L2 mental lexicon network. Mathematical proofs and detailed discussion are collected in the final section, in which we give also mathematical interpretation on some models which were shown by computer simulations in previous works.

The Influence of L1 Semantic Transfer on the Development of the L2 Mental Lexicon

The Influence of L1 Semantic Transfer on the Development of the L2 Mental Lexicon

L1 influence on the processing of L2 collocation: An experimental study of Korean EFL learners

The current study aimed to investigate the influence of L1 on the processing of L2 collocations utilizing a phrase-acceptability judgement task. The task was conducted on 39 English collocations with 19 native speakers of English and 45 Korean EFL learners. Their error rates and reaction times were measured both on the congruent collocations that have L1 translation equivalents and the incongruent collocations that do not have ones. It was found that the advanced EFL learners responded significantly faster to and made fewer errors on both the congruent and the incongruent collocations than the intermediate EFL learners. Meanwhile, both the advanced and the intermediate EFL learners made significantly more errors and responded slower under incongruent condition, indicating a strong congruency effect. The results implied that there exists a high degree of reliance on L1 intralexical knowledge in processing L2 collocations by the EFL learners, and acquiring incongruent L2 collocations seems still challenging even to the advanced learners. However, it was also suggested that once EFL learners notice incongruent collocations as valid ones and store them in their L2 mental lexicon, they may be able to processing incongruent collocations as efficiently as native speakers, directly linking L2 collocation forms to their concepts independently of L1 mediation. (Hanyang University)

L1 Role in Bilinguals’ Mental Lexicon: A Comparative Study between Chinese-English and Alphabetic Bilinguals

This study is to compare L1 (first language) roles between Chinese-English and alphabetic bilinguals’ mental lexicons through reviewing empirical studies. L1 lexicon plays an important role in L2 (second language) processing in two aspects for alphabetic bilinguals, automatic activation of similar L1 to sensory input of L2, and that of L1 translation equivalent. While for Chinese English learners, L1 lexicon basically influences L2 by equivalent activation only, and the effect may persist throughout their lives, which is dramatically different from the developmental pattern of alphabetic bilinguals. The differences may come from different typological distance between the two languages, different composition of L2 mental lexicon, and their unique English acquisition experience in China.

The time-course of morphosyntactic and semantic priming in late bilinguals: A study of German adjectives

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing.

Triple operations of rendaku processing: Native Chinese and Korean speakers learning Japanese

Abstract The present study investigated a hypothesis proposing the involvement of three operations in processing Japanese sequential voicing (rendaku): a lexical-specific operation, an etymology-specific operation, and a rule-based operation. Second language (L2) learners of Japanese are in the process of constructing an L2 mental lexicon of Japanese, and this lexicon is assumed to display a clear contrast between rule-based and etymology-specific occurrences of rendaku in early-stage learning and lexical-specific rendaku at later stages as a result of memory-based lexical learning. Native Chinese (N=32) and Korean (N=32) speakers learning Japanese, matched for their lexical and grammatical knowledge, avoided applying rendaku in compounds with a medial voiced obstruent in the second element, indicating that Lyman’s Law is an active principle even in L2 acquisition. Both L2 learner groups also showed sensitivity to lexical strata by distinguishing Japanese-origin words (wago) from Sino-Japanese words (kango) and alphabetic loanwords (gairaigo). Thus, as factors of rendaku processing, Lyman’s Law is considered rule-based while lexical stratum is considered etymology-specific. In contrast, both L2 learner groups showed a low occurrence of rendaku both for Lyman’s Law exceptions (i.e., X+basigo) and for infrequent or rare words (i.e., X+zyootyuu). These instances can be considered memory-based, lexical-specific rendaku, which L2 learners must acquire as individual lexical items. This study indicated that all three described operations were used by L2 Japanese speakers to process rendaku.

Word Class Influence upon L1 and L2 English Word Association

AbstractThis study explores word class influence upon L1 and L2 word association. The participants included 26 L1 English speakers and 28 advanced EFL learners who finished an English word association test that involved three types of stimuli: nouns, verbs and adjectives. Response words to the stimuli were classified into paradigmatic, syntagmatic, encyclopedic and form-based categories. Results show that: 1) L2 mental lexicon largely resembled that of L1 English speakers in that both were dominated by paradigmatic association, but L2 syntagmatic association was obviously weaker than that of L1 across the three word classes; 2) Verbs and adjectives demonstrated a greater potential to elicit syntagmatic responses than nouns in both L1 and L2 association; 3) Compared with verbs and adjectives, nouns were more paradigmatically challenging to L2 learners.

Incidental acquisition of new words during reading in L2: Inference of meaning and its integration in the L2 mental lexicon – ERRATUM

A novel combination of several experimental and non-experimental paradigms was applied to explore initial stages of incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) during reading in German as a second language (L2). The results show that syntactic complexity of the context positively affects incidental acquisition of new words, triggering the learner's shift of attention from the text level to the word level. A subsequent semantic priming task revealed that the new words establish associations with semantically related representations in the L2 mental lexicon after just three previous occurrences and without any consolidation period. The semantic inhibition effect for the new words (contrary to semantic facilitation for known L2 words), however, indicates that the memory traces of the new semantic representation are still very weak and that their retrieval is probably hindered by stronger semantically related representations that have much lower activation thresholds and higher potential for being selected.

Incidental acquisition of new words during reading in L2: Inference of meaning and its integration in the L2 mental lexicon

A novel combination of several experimental and non-experimental paradigms was applied to explore initial stages of incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) during reading in German as a second language (L2). The results show that syntactic complexity of the context positively affects incidental acquisition of new words, triggering the learner's shift of attention from the text level to the word level. A subsequent semantic priming task revealed that the new words establish associations with semantically related representations in the L2 mental lexicon after just three previous occurrences and without any consolidation period. The semantic inhibition effect for the new words (contrary to semantic facilitation for known L2 words), however, indicates that the memory traces of the new semantic representation are still very weak and that their retrieval is probably hindered by stronger semantically related representations that have much lower activation thresholds and higher potential for being selected.

Word association patterns in a second/foreign language – what do they tell us about the L2 mental lexicon?

The aim of the article is to review the findings of research into patterns of word associations in both first and second language and discuss its relevance for the understanding of L2 lexical processes. Word association studies have been used widely in areas such as psychology and first language acquisition and have resulted in detailed descriptions of word association behaviour of speakers at different ages and stages of language development. As far as research into L2 word associations is concerned, it concentrated predominantly on the differences between native and non-native association patterns, types of links between words in the L2 mental lexicon as well as the influence of general language proficiency on word association behaviour.

Study on the Organizational Pattern of Mental Lexicon for Chinese ESL College Students of Science

This paper tries to provide both theoretical and pedagogical evidence on the organizational pattern of L2 mental lexicon for Chinese ESL learners and teachers. The evidence results from a carefully designed empirical research where the subjects are ESL students with different language proficiencies from software school of DUT. Results show that the organizational pattern of Chinese ESL learners’ mental lexicon is a mix of semantic and non-semantic network, and it is rather dynamic. Efforts of reconstructing the lexicon network are necessary.