Chinese Efl Learners’ Cognition Of Color And Color-Related Emotional Expressions

Linguistic relativity theory proposes that languages in the world differ in their lexical and morphosyntactic rules and categories and these different linguistic ways of categorizing human experience determine the cognitive ways of categorizing it.In accordance with this theory,Pavlenko(2014)pointed out L2 learners may have to modify mental representations of emotion categories and patterns of cognitive appraisal-this process may include category restructuring,expansion,and narrowing,as well as internalization of new emotion categories that do not have a counterpart in the L1.In English and Chinese,blue and red have different metaphorical expressions and emotional meanings.Feeling blue and see red are typical of English to express depression and anger,which don’t exist in Chinese.Meanwhile,English speaking participants mostly consider blue and red as negative emotions but Chinese participants think them positive.However,whether L2 learning affects Chinese EFL learners’ cognition of color and color-related expressions remains unanswered.The present study,therefore,is intended to address this issue.More specifically,it aims to address the following three questions.1)What emotions do color and color term blue evoke in Chinese EFL learners? 2)What emotions do color and color term red evoke in Chinese EFL learners? 3)Does L2 learning affect L2 learners’ cognition of color and color terms? 61 Highly proficient Chinese EFL learners and 60 less proficient Chinese EFL learners participated in present research.Data collected from 21 native English speakers was used as a baseline.In order to answer these three questions,three measures as questionnaires in Experiment I,priming paradigms in Experiments II and III and test with 9 sentences of color-related emotional expressions in Experiment IV were adopted to analyze what emotions highly proficient Chinese EFL learners,less proficient Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers would think of blue and red in both explicit and implicit ways.In Experiment I,color blocks and color terms red and blue were used to see what emotions three groups of participants thought explicitly.In Experiment II and Experiment III,color blocks and color terms red and blue were employed in each experiment as priming,reaction time to positive,negative and neutral emotions of participants(highly proficient and less proficient learners in Experiment II;highly proficient,less proficient learners and native English speakers in Experiment III)was collected and analyzed to see which emotions would be primed by either color blocks red and blue or color terms red and blue.In Experiment IV,emotional meanings of red and blue in various sentences were written by highly proficient Chinese EFL learners,less proficient Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers to further identify what specific meanings of red and blue these three groups of participants would think of with the help of the contexts.The results show that red in both color block and color term mostly elicits more negative emotions,especially anger in highly proficient Chinese EFL learners than in less proficient Chinese EFL learners.Blue,specifically in color term,arouses both positive and negative emotions in highly proficient Chinese EFL learners than in less proficient Chinese EFL learners.But color block blue doesn’t have significant emotional meanings for Chinese EFL learners in current study.The results in present research shed some light on the study of L2 learners’ cognition,in which with a high language proficiency of second language,participants are more likely to think in a native English way,and Chinese EFL learners mostly think of red as negative and blue as both positive and negative in this case.Thus a conclusion can be made that L2 learning does in some way shape L2 learners’ cognition of color and color terms.