Method:Stimulus-response words with different(including strong,moderate,weak) association strength,and no association categories were chosen from word association thesaurus as experiment materials.

Through the investigation the writer found that word association in the L2 learner’s mental lexicon is more complicated and the ratio of paradigmatic to syntagmatic responses in word association experiments might not be a good ruler to measure the L2 learner’s word association ability, because they are not affected by mental health condition or age difference but mainly affected by linguistic,.

This paper attempts to testifythe three different viewpoints concerningL2 mental lexicon—the phonological view, the semantic view and thesyntactic view, using the models of mental lexicon organization and lexicalaccess as the theoretical data base and the word association test as theresearch instrument.

Study of word association for young and old people;

Methods: Word association data were obtained from two cohorts of Chinese adults.

Word association network was constructed respectively based on the source of word association data.

In this paper, one aspect of vocabulary, that is word association knowledge has been proved to facilitate vocabulary retention, to enlarge one’s vocabulary size.