Psycholinguistic Analysis Of Causes Of Chinglish

Nowadays, of the over five thousand languages in the world, English is the most widely used language. There is a growing awareness that English has become an international language. Therefore, there are more and more Chinese learning English as their second language for various reasons, most frequently for facilitating themselves in international communication. However, after several years study, Chinese Learners of English (CLE) notice that the output of their learning is still in a question, i.e. it is still quite different from English-native speakers in many ways and even can not be understood or may be misunderstood by the native speakers. The production of Chinese learners most frequently is Chinglish. Chinglish as a barrier for language acquisition and international communication presents many difficulties. Therefore, the recognition and the removal of the grotesque phenomenon remain of paramount importance.This thesis presents the problem of Chinglish and an introduction of the relevant theories, the Theory of Mental lexicon in Psycholinguistics and the PDP theory in particular. Then a brief review of Chinglish with its definition and its distinctions from China English and varieties of English are presented. Instead of treating it as grammatical errors, the author believes that Chinglish should be treated as nonnative-likeness or inappropriateness. Actually, Chinglish mainly refers to the expression which is correct grammatically but inappropriate semantically. A think-aloud experiment is conducted and the results are classified, analyzed and discussed on the pedagogical implications of Chinglish with an aim to reduce or eradicate.Various studies of Chinglish are scattered in books or articles in the field of English teaching and learning, while there has never formed the same voice towards the problem. Holding a different understanding about the causes of Chinglish, this paper dares to use the mental lexicon theory of psycholinguistics and PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) theory to explain the formation of Chinglish. The think-aloud experiment is conducted to explain that it is due to the differences between L1 and L2 mental lexicon organizations, particularly poor or lack of semantic connections in L2 mental lexicon, that Chinglish is produced as the direct literal translation or an intra-lingual analogy by CLE. By probing the deep-rooted causes of Chinglish, the author hopes to find some solutions for it in order to facilitate second language acquisition in the future, and hopes future research will be done along this line in detail.