A Study On Verbal Misunderstanding From Psycho-cognitive Perspective

communication, misunderstanding occurs with the development of communication, and it can influence or even determine the direction of communication. Misunderstanding of key information may even lead to the breakdown of the entire communicative endeavor. Many scholars at home and abroad have made their contributions to the studies of misunderstanding, but most of them have stopped with simply giving a definition for the phenomenon or classifying it. Though there are some who have devoted their research work to the generative mechanism of misunderstanding, many of them are simply limited to the listing of various causes of misunderstanding, which are far from being systematic.Foreign scholars such as Sperber and Wilson analyzed the phenomenon of misunderstanding on the basis of the Relevance Theory, and they pointed out that misunderstanding is caused by the listener's incorrect inferring about the uncertain factors in the speaker's utterance. An essential standard, which determines whether the inference is correct or not, lies in whether the cognitive context of both communicators is mutually matched. A lot of researches have also been done on this subject recently, among which Mr. Zong Shihai's generative mechanism of misunderstanding is the most systematic one. Zong identified two major sources which may result in misunderstanding: the speaker's utterance and the listener's psychology. And he also made further investigation on the psychological source of misunderstanding, and divided it into general psychology and social psychology.The major research question of this thesis is to explore the psycho-cognitive mechanism for misunderstanding generation. As a complex cognitive activity which involves language, social culture and individual's psychology, misunderstanding does not only happen at the linguistic level, the uncertainty of communicative context and the listener's psychological state can exert important influence on the process of utterance comprehension. Integrating the two influential finding in previous research and focusing on the process of utterance comprehension, this thesis views misunderstanding as an inappropriate cognitive process of utterance meaning, put linguistic factors, cognitive context and cognitive psychology which influence the process of understanding within a comprehensive model so as to formulate a psycho-cognitive mechanism of misunderstanding generation.