On The Relationship Between Language And Thinking In English And Chinese In The Psychological Process Of Chinese Adults' English Reading

The relationship between language and thinking is always a topic of considerable debate. In 400 BC, it had already been discussed by the ancient Greek philosophers, and up to now, there are still different views on it.Reading is the main source of language input and accumulation. The importance of reading in language learning becomes more and more important. Bacon has said,"History make man wise; poets, witty..."For the Chinese English learners, the development of English reading ability is rather difficult. Different from the reading in native language, English reading is a process in which English and Chinese affect each other for the Chinese readers who have already had strong and mature native language system. In 2005, professor Yin Demo of Xihua University proposed the theory of"Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures", focusing on the knowledge structure and cognitive structure of English and Chinese, and the relationship between language, thinking and CKBDS. This paper is to further study and prove the CKBDS.Based on the theory analysis and experiment study, this paper is to discuss Chinese and English and the relationship between these two languages and thinking from vocabulary, sentence structure and context. It will combine CKBDS with the Chinese adults'English reading psychological process. From the storage and picking-up of the bilinguals'mental lexicon, and the importance of readers'existed schema knowledge in context, this paper is to analyze the effect of thinking in the first language for English learners and whether there's relationship between English proficiency and the involvement of the first language. Through the analysis of the experiments of vocabulary and syntactic structure, this thesis is trying to make clear how the two languages link on different stages.Combining the prior theories with the above three experiments, the following conclusions are made:1)For the foreign language learner in the native language environment, the involvement of their native language will be different with the development of the foreign language proficiency; And no matter how well-developed their foreign language is, they cannot avoid the involvement of the native language as long as they are in the native environment.2)The native language and foreign language link by form on the word level; While on the syntactic structure, they link by semantic.