A Study On The Mental Process Of Speech Comprehension And Its Implications In EFL Listening Teaching

Speech comprehension is a complex mental process, which plays a significant part in our English study. Based on the psycholinguistics theory and taken English as its researching language, the thesis tries to find out the mental processes of speech perception and comprehension, as well as its both linguistic and non-linguistic functioning elements.This thesis firstly discusses the theoretical foundations of speech comprehension from the information processing model, and then it explains the processes and functional factors of speech perception. Chapter Three as the key part of the thesis, analyses the mental processes of speech comprehension form lexicon to sentences and discourse.According to these research findings, we can find out that speech comprehension is a dynamic process of deriving meaning from the speech flow. To arrive at meaning, the listener must actively apply both his linguistic knowledge concerning phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics and non-linguistic knowledge like the knowledge of the world, schemata and context. So in Chapter Four, I investigate the problems and difficulties in students' English listening study by means of questionnaires and observation, and points out some implications for EFL listening teaching in China.