The Cognitive Analysis Of English Discourse Comprehension Under The Construction Of Schema Driven By Mental Lexicon

Since the 1980s, from the perspective of cognitive psychology, Linguistic researches have introduced a great number of valuable theories engaged in language research and teaching from intermediate subjects. Herein, a couple of theoretical results have flourished magnificently the research of the first language teaching as well as the second language teaching in which schema theory, as a representative, is frequently applied in various aspects of discourse comprehension. Linguists Goodman (1970) and Smith (1978), on the basis of "bottom-up" and "top-down" model, develop an "interactive" model for reading comprehension. Schema a form of psychological representation, however, is so inclined to boost the subjective employment that its objective force cannot be granted appropriate comment and application. Thereafter, this paper introduces mental lexicon associated with schema theory, centering on the necessary relationship of their co-relations, clarifying the psychological mechanism of schema's application to discourse comprehension as well as its maximal value and presenting a detailed overview of how interactive model works in practice.As a matter of course, discourse comprehension is a cognitive process of encoding and decoding. The application of schema is chiefly reflected on its background knowledge that functions in language comprehension. In the process of discourse comprehension, readers should bear relevant linguistic knowledge, activate background knowledge and construct local semantic network that is beneficial to the whole comprehension. Yang (2001) believes that semantic network is something of linguistic lexical nodes in relation to schema and a systemized lexical convergence based on certain semantic concepts. Therefore, it can be implied that discourse comprehension is a psychological process of encoding and decoding by means of analyzing schemata and mental lexicon nodes. The paper mainly aims to demonstrate the following issues in attempt to steer clear of the significance of application of schema theory driven by mental lexicon to English discourse comprehension.First, clarify the applicable value of conventional schema theory and point out its shortcomings;Second, propose schemata application driven by mental lexicon and explain its organization form and inter-relations between mental lexicon and schemata as a complicated network;Third, discuss how to retrieve the relevant information out of a group of activated information and fill in the information slot to schemata knowledge;Fourth, probe into information value of generative schemata and how to combine them with reader's schemata as well as writer's schemata to construct local semantic network as well as information on the analysis of English discourse in College English;Fifth, construct the whole information and complete the entire process of encoding and decoding discourse information by means of several schemata activation models;Sixth, conduct empirical studies to compare different functions by conventional schema theory's application and the innovated one. The result identifies the later one is better than the former one, especially in respect of its virtual value;Seventh, explain how to provide modern foreign language teaching with new thoughts;Discourse comprehension is a very complicated cognitive process that consists of linguistic and non-linguistic information and embodies their systemized and complicated features. The appropriate retrieval of relevant information capacity requires rational cooperation between mental lexicon and schema theory. Thus, it is highly essential to tackle their inter-relations properly. Mental lexicon's retrieval is largely dependent on linguistic information while schema theory relies heavily on non-linguistic schemata. The harmonious cooperation between these two schemata can be clustered into appropriate semantic fields. In other words, mental lexicon's retrieval is in great need of identical cooperation. Likewise, the exact retrieval of schemata requires the filling of information slot by lexical nodes so as to generate new schemata. Information retrieval is adjacent to the highest touch point, in match with readers' stored information. If the match can be perfect, the retrieval is speedy and vice versa. At the latter situation, other relative factors may account for the filling of information slot to continue its construction of local network. In combination with reader's schemata as well as writer's schemata can the whole discourse information be decoded.The writer devotes much time to the detailed analysis of experimental results, associates them with conventional discourse analysis model and proposes a more efficient discourse teaching approach, which offers modern foreign language teaching a necessary complement. In language teaching, the writer takes measure to apply it to language teaching and proves that mental lexicon is an indispensable basis in the process of schematized language teaching.There are still some shortcomings in this research. For instance, problems that the research doesn't involve wider range of subjects and the choice of materials is inadequate have posed negative impact on its proficiency. Thus, the writer is dedicated to further study and discussion about those underlying problems in future teaching and research.