Dr Wendy Jiang

Dr Wenying (Wendy) Jiang is a lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures.

During her Fellowship, Wendy will be completing her second monograph entitled “Chinese Word Association: L1 and L2 Mental Lexicons”. It aims to compare and contrast the word association responses from native Chinese speakers (L1) and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. The methodology used is a word association test (WAT), which involves respondents producing the word that first present in their minds as being associated with a particular stimulus word.

Mental lexicon refers to a language user’s knowledge of words. Researchers have used ‘network’ or ‘word-web’ as convenient shorthand to convey the idea that speakers store words in some kind of interconnected system in the mental lexicon (Aitchison, 2003; Wilks & Meara, 2002; Wilks, Meara & Wolter, 2005; Wolter, 2001).

Such an interconnected system is typically explored through a word association test/task (WAT), which involves respondents producing the word or words that first present in their minds as being associated with a particular stimulus word (Wilks & Meara, 2002; Wilks, Meara & Wolter, 2005; Wolter, 2001). WAT research is driven by the belief that these associations can reveal information about the development, structure and dynamic organization of the mental lexicon in either L1 or L2. Knowledge of similarities and/or differences between the dynamic organizations of L1 and L2 mental lexicons is essential in understanding the acquisition process of L2 vocabulary. It is also important in designing appropriate pedagogy to effectively teach L2 vocabulary. The comparison of Chinese L1 and L2 mental lexicons in particular greatly contributes to understanding mental lexicon because Chinese is fundamentally different from English and the current knowledge of mental lexicon is mainly based on English.