A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Cognition And Mental Processing Mechanism Of English Motion Events

Space is generally considered a central cognitive domain,interwoven into human life.The past four decades has witnessed an increasing interest in the study of crosslinguistic similarities and differences in the encoding of spatial relations,such as the conceptualization of an object and its motion in the perceptual field,and the particular research into the understanding of motion event expressions has exhibited striking variations from language to language,providing a diverse pool of typological theories.Despite the broad appeal of the typological research,in which English has been meticulously studied,Chinese has gained only general treatment,and the relationship between Chinese and English is scarcely touched upon.As a result,much remains unknown,such as how language-specific properties of Chinese and English affect the online allocation of attention by speakers of these two languages during language execution and event apprehension.Guided with the theoretical frameworks of Talmy‘s typology theory,Slobin‘s ?Thinking for Speaking?(TFS)hypothesis and Croft‘s Construction Grammar,this dissertation carried out three independent but also interrelated studies via a traditional paradigm of controlled writing and a cognitive paradigm of computer-based online processing.Using a wordless comic story ?Father and Son? to elicit the English and Chinese motion event expressions,the controlled writing study tapped the ?Thinking for Writing?(TFW)mechanism of Chinese learners of English as a Foreign Language(henceforth EFL)as well as the English native speakers(henceforth ENSs).The online processing study attempted to investigate the ?Thinking for Perceiving?(TFP)mechanism reflected by Chinese EFL learners‘ and ENSs‘ lexical and syntactic preference while visualizing a motion event.The priming study examined how Chinese EFL learners were primed by the event structure and the event verb in motion descriptions,offering the interplay of ?Priming and Perceiving?(PAP)during online motion event comprehension.Under the continuous and dynamic perspective,the results revealed that Chinese EFL learners‘ utilization of lexical,semantic,and structural potentials in processing English motion events was affected by various factors.Drawing on the data of ENSs as a parallel baseline and comparing them with the data of Chinese EFL learners of two English proficiency levels,the study tended to draw a picture of Chinese EFL learners‘ developmental patterns in acquiring English motion expressions.The dissertation comes to the following conclusions.First,crosslinguistic differences exist in the motion expressions by Chinese EFL learners and ENSs.Irrespective of the similar tendency in the use of motion verbs,Path information is more frequently attended to by Chinese EFL learners than ENSs in their English descriptions.With more deictic nuances encoded in forms of ?come?,?go?,etc.,Chinese EFL learners‘ motion event expressions demonstrate a tendency of overusing deictic verbs.Second,the online processing of motion events is subject to various linguistic constraints and language-specific biases.Besides participants‘ factors such as their language proficiency,their familiarity to certain motion expressions and so on,language-specific semantic and syntactic requirements(e.g.,motion event type,the syntactic and semantic complexity of motion expressions,the encoding bias and so on)also create much pressure on Chinese EFL learners‘ L2 event apprehension.Third,Chinese EFL learners‘ processing efficiency of motion expressions can be boosted by the structural and lexical overlap between the prime sentence and the target sentence: while the ?event structure only? prime creates a slight priming effect by EFL learners of both high and low proficiency levels,the ?event structure + event verb? prime yields a remarkable priming effect,indicating that the prime sentence can activate a conceptual transfer to EFL learners‘ mental processing of motion event expressions to some extent.Four,Chinese EFL learners‘ proficiency levels are closely associated with how well they can use the motion event expressions in English,and as they move along to a higher proficiency level,they demonstrate a more accurate and efficient processing capacity to tackle the motion expressions with complex structures.The dissertation,by offering empirically-based insights into the production and comprehension of motion event expressions,contributes to an under-researched field of how language-specific properties of two typologically similar languages exert influences on second language acquisition(henceforth SLA).The findings of the study,echoing what Cadierno(2008)has proposed that motion event study should additionally contribute to the field of SLA,can guide language educators in developing new methods and instructional materials for addressing motion expressions by creating maximal coherence within the sentential context and conceptualizations of spatial meanings,increasing contact-induced motion talks to enhance EFL learners‘ ability of conceptual schema construction,etc.