Influence Of Cognitive And Psychological Factors On Topic Construction Transfer Of Chinese English Learners

Language transfer, a controversial topic, has long been considered as an important part in SLA. A review of the studies on it shows that it had never been explored from the cognitive perspective until the end of 1970s. In 1979, Kellerman put forward two cognitive and psychological concepts: prototypicality and psychotypology. The former concept refers to native speakers'own perceptions of the structure of their language, treating some structures as potentially non-transferable and others as potentially transferable (Kellerman, 1979, 1986, 1989), while the latter one means learners'perceptions about the distance between L1 and L2, deciding whether to transfer those items they perceived to be potentially transferable. However, the researches undertaken by Kellerman are under the framework of languages from the same language family and are only involved with lexicon transfer, inspired by which, the author, in this thesis, applies Kellerman's theory model into research of the transfer of Chinese topic constructions in Chinese-English Interlanguage, trying to extend it to the syntax level and explore its efficiency in predicting transfer between languages from different language families.To make it clear, two questions are raised:(1) Does the prototypicality of CTCs have any influence on the transfer of them in the English performance of Chinese learners of English? Does the influence differ among students at different English proficiency levels?(2) Does the psychotypology of CTCs have any influence on the transfer of them in the English performance of Chinese learners of English? Does the influence differ among students at different English proficiency levels?The experiment is carried out among 90 Chinese learners of English. They are required to finish three tasks: two judgment tests and a translation test. The former two are to test the perception of typicality of CTCs and the perception of psychological distance between CTCs and their corresponding English structures, while the latter one is to find out the transfer frequency of different CTCs in Chinese-English translation. The results suggest that prototypicality can predict language transfer at the lower level, while psychotypology can predict it at the intermediate and the higher levels. The reason why there comes out different results at different levels is that psychotypology and transfer frequency will change with the improvement of second language proficiency, while prototypicality won't.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introductory chapter, which introduces the research background, research significance and the whole structure. Chapter two reviews the theoretical background of the study of language transfer in SLA. In chapter three, research methodology is demonstrated and verified, including the participants and the instruments used in the study, and the method of data collection and data analysis. Chapter four presents and discusses the results of the data analyses in relation to the research questions raised. Chapter five summarizes the results of the study. The implications, limitations of the present study and suggestions for the future study are also included in this part.