An Empirical Study On The Acquisition Of Polysemous Words With Core-sense And Non-core-sense Cues

The multiple senses of polysemy often causes problems and confusion for learners. And many studies have illustrated the acquisition of polysemy is far worse than the acquisition of other types of words. The main reason is that learners do not have appropriate way to acquire polysemy. Based on the structuralistic view, learners often treat those senses separately, which is not only harmful to their understanding but also increases the burden of memory. However, cognitive linguistics considers the multiple senses of polysemy are related, because it holds that the different senses are derived from a core sense. This idea provides a good theoretical support to the acquisition of polysemy. Therefore, the author assumes that teaching core sense first and guiding students to comprehend the relationship between core sense and peripheral senses will be conducive to the acquisition of polysemy.So on the basis of prototype theory in cognitive linguistics and elaboration in psycholinguistics, the author will probe into the acquisition of polysemy under the conditions of providing core cue and non-core cue by an empirical study to find an effcient approach. And the research attempts to answer the following questions:(1) Is a core cue more effective than a non-core cue in helping learners guess the figurative sense of an unknown polysemous word?(2) Does a core cue lead to better retention of an unknown polysemous word than a non-core cue?(3) Is there any correlation between guessing and retention of the senses of the target words with core cue and non-core cue? If there is, how does that happen; if not, why?Altogether 99 non-English freshmen from Jiangxi Normal University participate in the present research. They are randomly divided into two groups, group1( core-cued group) and group 2 (non-core-cued group).There is a one-to-one interview after each stage to obtain qualitative data.Guessing, short-term retention and long-term retention scores as well as their correlations are analyzed through SPSS. Such analyses together with the interview lead to following findings:Firstly, the two groups show significant difference in the guessing test. Core-cued group performs better than non-core-cued group. Secondly, both groups do not exhibit any significant difference in the short-term retention.Thirdly, two groups show significant difference in long-term retention test. A core-cued group scores significant higher than non-core-cued group.Fourthly, as a whole, there exists a positive correlation between inferred words and retained words, though the coefficients are not very high. There exists a positive correlation between guessing and retention in core-cued group. However, the correlation between guessing and long-term retention is negative and insignificant for non-core-cued group.Based on the above results, the author concludes that great attention should be paid on the core sense during teaching and learning, that is, having a good command of core sense first and comprehending the relationship between core sense and figurative senses. And for textbook designers, it will be better to introduce new polysemous items by presenting the core sense of polysemous words first.