| Popis: |
This study addresses the question as to whether the degrees of similarity between lexical items differ between an L1 mental lexicon and L2 mental lexicons of different sizes. T is a measure of the distance between a pair of lexical items, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0; the lower T is, the higher the degree of similarity. A free sorting task using a set of 50 high-frequency Englishverbs was given to 30 native speakers of English (NS), 30 Japanese speakers of English with large vocabulary size (M=6273.3，SD=258.6) (LARGE) and 30 Japanese speakers of English with small vocabulary size (M=4683.3，SD=155.5) (SMALL), t=28.86, df=58, p＜.01, r=.97. The obtained T results of dendrogram distance, based on the Hamming distances of all the lexical item pairs, for each group were put into matrices and converted into frequency data.The data of the three groups were then submitted to permutation tests (six different pair-wisecomparisons). The analysis revealed that the Ts of the three groups were statistically different from each other at the 5% significance level. NS produced more lexical item pairs having moderate to low Ts (0.5≦T＜0.9), followed by LARGE, and SMALL produced the least. In the case of lexical item pairs with very low Ts (0.9≦T),however, the results were reversed, with SMALL producing them in the highest number, followed by LARGE, and NS the lowest. |
