The data was collected by the glossary association examination taken by 28 elitists and 30 university students in social sciences and art.

Therefore, it is necessary to explore Chinese EFL learners’mental lexicon links by employing word association test with a view to providing implications for vocabulary teaching.

This study explores the effects of language proficiency, depth of word knowledge and word class on the links of L2 mental lexicon through a word association test and vocabulary knowledge scale test, which are administered upon two groups of different language proficiency students using the same list of prompt words.

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.

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.