The Organization of the Senses of Polysemy in Japanese EFL Learners’ Mental Lexicon

Abstract

The structure of the mental lexicon has been widely researched, but few studies focusing on polysemy have been conducted, even in an L1 (a learner's first language) context, and almost no research has been conducted in an L2 (a learner's second language) context. The current study aims to scrutinize how the different vocabulary size groups of Japanese EFL learners classify the various senses of basic polysemous words and to compare their categorization with sense classification based on a linguistic dictionary. The results indicated that those with an estimated vocabulary size consisting of 5500 words or over (hereafter, the upper group) classified senses in a more similar way to the dictionary than those whose vocabulary size comprised 5000 or fewer words (hereafter, the lower group). This was despite the fact that they both understood the target context well and the number of categorizations created was almost the same between the two groups. Moreover, the upper group tended to classify the senses of polysemy in a more similar way to the other participants in the same vocabulary group, while the lower group's categorization was more divergent and less well-organized. These findings indicated that even though the participants understood each sense, the difference appeared in the ability to categorize the senses, suggesting that grouping the senses needs knowledge different from simply understanding them, and this knowledge is not yet fully developed even for basic words.

How well are primary and secondary meanings of L2 words acquired?

“…The few L2 studies available on the topic have focused on investigating polysemy alone (Crossley et al, 2010;Hoshino & Shimizu, 2018;Verspoor & Lowie, 2003). Verspoor and Lowie (2003) examined the intentional learning of unknown polysemous words by advanced L2 learners.…”

“…There have been relatively few studies (particularly in second languages [L2]) that explicitly examined the acquisition of the secondary meanings of words and how vocabulary learning is affected by polysemy and homonymy. This is surprising because multi-meaning words (particularly polysemous ones) are very common in language (Hoshino & Shimizu, 2018). This is especially the case for the most frequent words (conforming with Zipf's law), with some estimations suggesting that the 3,000 most frequent English words could have up to 10,000 different meanings (Stahl & Nagy, 2006).…”

“…Historical linguistics classifies the different meanings that words can take into two main categories: polysemous (i.e., various senses that derive from the same origin and share an underlying theme) and homonymous (i.e., discrete meanings that derive from different origins and thus are unrelated). Although several L2 studies have investigated polysemy (Hoshino & Shimizu, 2018;Kellerman, 1986;Verspoor & Lowie, 2003), the acquisition of L2 homonymy is largely unexplored. Thus, it is still unclear how homonymous meanings of words are learnt by L2 speakers compared to polysemous senses 1 .…”