MACRO AND MICRO-INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG THREE ASPECTS OF LEXICAL KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore two levels of relationship among three aspects of lexical knowledge: vocabulary size, polysemy and collocational knowledge. The first level is macro relationship, which is general relationship among these aspects of lexical knowledge. The second is micro relationship which is a relationship among the three aspects of vocabulary knowledge of 12 anchored words. The participants were a total of 167 Japanese EFL university students whose English proficiency was relatively low. The results of macro analysis indicated that strong correlations among the Vocabulary Size Measure, the Revised Word Associates Polysemy Test, and the Revised Word Associates Collocation Test, which suggested that vocabulary size and two aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge are closely related. On the other hand, the results of micro analysis implied that strong item dependency and wide individual variation; thus, no clear hierarchical acquisition pattern was identified for these aspects of lexical knowledge for the EFL learners in this study.