Volume 29, Issue 2
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.238
RECOGNITION AND APPLICATION OF MENTAL LEXICONS AMONG LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Abstract
Many Chinese people are learning English as a foreign language (EFL), but only a few of them have achieved a good command of the language. This paper attempts to study the recognition and application of mental lexicons among individual EFL learners. The research data were collected through a questionnaire survey on high school students, college students, and graduate students in Hangzhou, China. Through statistical analysis, the author examined how EFL learners recognize semantic features and learn mental lexicons of English, and investigated how different groups of students recognize and classify English mental lexicons. The result show that high school students, college students, and graduate students have significant differences in classifying mental lexicons; with the growing English level, students have a new understanding of mental lexicons and their semantic organization, and can perform continuous simplification and induction; as the English level of an individual continues to improve, the semantic organization of English word meanings changes continuously in his/her brain, from an ambiguous concept to a detailed cognition. The research lays a solid foundation for similar studies on individual learning of English mental lexicons.
Keywords
Mental Lexicon, Learning Method, Lexical Recognition, Multi-Dimensional Scale Analysis.