A Diachronic Comparison of the Organizational Pattern and Network Structure of Chinese EFL Learners'Word Associations
This study adopts word association tests to investigate diachronic changes in organizational patterns and network structures of Chinese EFL learners'word association networks during two decades.Results show that:1)Chinese EFL learners'word association networks are dominated by semantic relations,with low and high proficiency participants exhibiting different developmental trends in terms of collocational and hierarchical knowledge;learners in current stage perform a dramatic increase of morphological relations in non-semantic responses;2)Chinese EFL learners'word association networks possess the"small-world"property,with sparsity increasing as L2 proficiency grows and stability declining as"small-worldness"increases.This study provides a diachronic depiction of vocabulary learning and insights for vocabulary assessment.
word associationsorganizational patternnetwork structuresemantic and network analysisdiachronic comparison
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
