Cognitive Research On English Text Comprehension

Text (discourse), the most complicated structure of the language elements, is the basic means of human being's communication as well as the important premise of the existence of communicative activities. Its features lie in two aspects: on the one hand, it exists as a substantial object; on the other hand, the mechanism of producing and understanding of discourse is connected with social activities of the language users.Though the history of text linguistics on texts isn't very long, it has changed their analytical methods from the aspect of grammar, the semantics to the pragmatics-based methods. Those methods, all of which regarded the sentences as the biggest elements in linguistics and broke the limitation of the traditional ones which paid their attention to the intrinsic phenomenon of linguistics, haven't broken away from the flaws of static research methods.The development of cognitive science provided new approaches for the language research. Cognitive science is a new science which is related to philosophy, psychology, anthropology, neurolinguistics and computer science, etc. More and more researchers and scientists believe that everything has its cognitive process. Discourse is a language phenomenon based on psychological activities and is the product of psychological process.According to the cognition, discourse is not a static language phenomenon but a kind of creative activity of sign coding and encoding. Then the discourse analysis is understood from static research to dynamic research. Not only is the discourse regarded as a communicative activity, but also the knowledge system of the users has become the descriptive objects of the language research. Text comprehension is the unique cognitive activity for human beings. It is significant to know the psychological process and essence of text comprehension in order to instruct the language teaching activities.This thesis introduces the development history and recent situation of the text linguistics, and makes a deep explanation of the relationship between the discourse and cognitive science, the inference models in text comprehension and the theories of representation of text comprehension in different levels. It is hoped that the research can provide some suggestions for the text comprehension teaching by trying to put all of theories into practice.