Developmental features of Tibetan students’ Chinese L2 mental lexicon

Taking both category and network analysis approaches, the present study explored the developmental features of Tibetan students’ Chinese L2 mental lexicon. 72 Chinese words were chosen as the stimuli for the word association test, with frequency, word class, and concreteness being strictly controlled. The category features of the 7th graders’ and 10th graders’ mental lexicon connections were analyzed based on a modified categorization framework. The RR networks of the two groups were constructed with the help of Ucinet 6. The study found a series of unique features of Tibetan students’ Chinese mental lexicon. It revealed that with the increase of grade, Tibetan students’ lexical network improved in size and quality, but connection strength between words deserved more attention, especially in hierarchical, homogeneous and determinative word relations. The accumulative degree distributions were found to fit the exponential function better, showing that recency effect may be an important factor influencing their network growth. The findings help us understand Tibetan students’ Chinese mental lexicon structure in a more holistic way and provide an integrated perspective to study the nature of learners’ Chinese L2 mental lexicon.