Author(s): Wu Jie, Li Xiuzhi

Abstract: In the past two decades, the study of second language mental lexicon organization has become a research direction that has attracted much attention from scholars. The research on second language mental lexicon organization has achieved fruitful outcomes in both basic theoretical research and empirical research. The basic theoretical research mainly focuses on the lexical knowledge framework theory and the exploration of second language mental lexicon organization, while the empirical research explored the characteristics of second language learner’s mental lexicon organization based on the word association test as the main research method. In addition, future study needs to pay attention to the optimization of word association test, the use of multiple testing methods, the learners at the basic education level, and the attempt to integrate the findings with pedagogical practice research.

Keywords: Mental Lexicon, Vocabulary Development, Vocabulary Learning, Word Association Test

Article Info: Received: 03 Aug 2023; Received in revised form: 05 Sep 2023; Accepted: 12 Sep 2023; Available online: 17 Sep 2023

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.85.3