Prof. Li Ming and Zhang Lubei’s Publication in a Nature Sub-journa

A research paper entitled “Developmental Features of Tibetan Students’ Chinese L2 Mental Lexicon”, co-authored by Professor Li Ming and Professor Zhang Lubei from the School of Foreign Languages, was published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a sub-journal of Nature. Professor Li Ming serves as the first author and Professor Zhang Lubei as the corresponding author.

This paper integrates two methodologies—categorical data analysis and complex network analysis—to examine the developmental features of Tibetan students’ Chinese L2 mental lexicon. 72 Chinese words were selected as the stimuli for the word association test, with frequency, familiarity, concreteness, and word class being strictly controlled. The category features of the 7th graders’ and 10th graders’ mental lexicon connections were analyzed based on a three-level categorization framework. The Response-word (RR) networks of the two groups were constructed with the help of Ucinet 6. The study uncovered a series of unique features of Tibetan students’ Chinese mental lexicon. Key findings revealed that as grade levels advanced, their lexical network expanded in scale and improved in connection, but the strength of connections between words—particularly in hierarchical, homogeneous, and determinative word relations—remained an area warranting further attention. Analysis showed that the cumulative degree distributions of both networks conformed more closely to an exponential function, showing that recency effect may be an important factor influencing their network growth. The findings enhance our holistic understanding of Tibetan students’ Chinese mental lexicon structure and provide an integrated perspective to study the nature of learners’ Chinese L2 mental lexicon.

Indexed by SSCI and A&HCI, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications ranked Q1 in the JCR classification and is the only Nature-branded journal in the humanities and social sciences. Its Journal Citation Index (JCI) holds first place among 411 interdisciplinary journals in the humanities and second place among 267 in social sciences, establishing it as one of the most influential global journals in humanities and social sciences.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04723-0