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.