On The Construction And Representation Of Chinese-English "Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Structures" From The Syntactic Level

The"Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Structures"Hypothesis postulates that there exist knowledge structures and cognition structures of the mother tongue and foreign language which are interacted in the process of adult learners' foreign language learning. This theory has been verified and supported by evidences from neurolinguistics, cognitive psychology and some experiments concerning listening and reading skills. The present study tries to explore the Chinese-English bilinguals'syntactic construction and representation from the production and comprehension of the syntactic processing. This empirical study further explores the rationality of the"Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Structures"Hypothesis and how these structures are presented in human's brain by examining the priming effects in Chinese and between Chinese and English.Syntactic priming occurs in the process of on-line syntactic encoding, reflecting the existence of abstract syntactic representations. This paradigm is a reliable tool to explore how people's cognitive system represents syntactic structure. Study on the mechanism of syntax is mainly carried out through the syntactic priming paradigm, focusing on the language production. It was not until the latest few years that some researchers started to work at the comprehension process of syntactic ambiguity. This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 serves as a general introduction. Research background and research significance, research questions, research paradigm and organization of the study are presented. Chapter 2 introduces some of the related experimental study on bilingual syntactic representations, providing the detailed information of syntactic processing mechanism and cognitive models. Then the end of this chapter outlines the"Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Structures"Hypothesis, and a discussion on the similarities and differences between the Chinese and English syntactic structures based on the relationship between language and thinking and"Figure-Ground"Theory in cognitive linguistics. Three syntactic priming experiments in Chapter 3 investigated the on-line syntactic representation of the adult college Chinese-English bilinguals with different English proficiencies. Using sentence-completion task, Experiment 1 explored whether Chinese ditransitive constructions could priming English equivalent constructions and whether second language proficiency influences the processing of syntax. Experiment 2 and 3 utilized self-paced word-by-word moving window reading paradigms to investigate within Chinese syntactic priming effect and English-Chinese cross-linguistic priming effect during the comprehension of the syntactic contemporary ambiguity resolution. Experiment 2 showed priming effect occurred within Chinese, indicating that syntactic priming is not language specific. In Experiment 3, comparing with the data from Experiment2, it was found that for the Chinese-English bilinguals with higher English proficiencies, although the Chinese narrative-object structures and English relative clause structures serve the same function and differ in word order, the processing of the Chinese narrative-object structures was influenced by the prior experience with the English relative clause structure. The results indicate that the syntactic structures of Chinese narrative-object structures and English relative clauses share the same representation. However, priming was not occurred when the participants are the ones with lower English proficiencies, in other words, they stored the two kinds of structures separately. In chapter 4, there is a brief review of this study, the summary of the findings with inadequacy of the research and suggestions for further study.Overall, the thesis contributes to the enrichment of"Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Structures"hypothesis from the syntactic level. The construction and representation of syntactic structures were investigated both in language comprehension and production. The findings showed that the representation of bilinguals'knowledge structures and cognitive structures is dynamic system, and it changes as the second language proficiency improves.