The Mental Process Of English Word Cognition

The acquisition of lexicon is a vital element to understanding and being understood, and it is now commonly recognized that it plays a central and fundamental role in foreign language learning, and cognitive psychology influences individuals to a great extent during the whole acquisition process. This thesis is devoted to the application of cognitive psychology to the acquisition of English words, and is expected to shed some light on the teaching and learning of English words through seeking effective and appropriate ways.This thesis introduces basic construction of human brain and takes information processing system as cut-in point, analyzing the process that human brain receives input from multiple external sources through auditory, visual and spatial motor, and the information is successively encoded, stored, retrieved by a set of distinct mental structures. Then, by virtue of cognitive theories, this thesis advocates that teachers should attach more importance to the first explanation of new words and properties of root, affix and suffix. The input of lexicon becomes intake if there is a deep processing, and this thesis provides some acquisition strategies, which involve focusing on the pictorial representations, cognitive map, and acoustic input and so on so forth. Core words play an important role in effective store, so teachers should pay attention to developing students' ability of paraphrasing new words by core words. Proper use of lexical chunks and collocations facilitate long-term memory. Moreover, due to contextual effect, a new word can be highly cognized through active cognitive process, such as analysis, reasoning and judgment. And then, this thesis analyzes factors influence lexical cognition, say motivation and feedback, attention capacity and engagement as well as emotional reactions. in the perspective of metacognitive awareness.At the end of this thesis, a conclusion is drown which sums up the main points of this thesis and proposes some suggestions for further research.