A Study On The Psychological Representation Of Chinese And Middle - Aged Learners' Language Acquisition

Recently, Lexical chunks draw much attention in the field of linguistics.The research started earlier abroad, and have reached many achievements, which could give some certain perspective to the research of Chinese chunks for teaching. Part of the current Chinese chunks’ studies are descriptive, by using the language database. Others are the applied researches, on the foundation of language acquisition. However, there are few studies from the view of psycholinguistics or statistics. Thus the study aims at exploring the mental processing and representation of Chinese chunks for intermediate and advanced-level foreign students, and on the foundation of this, the article intends to build a model of the mental representation, which takes the students’language level and the type of Chinese chunks as two variable.First of all, this article summarizes the current researches both about chunks and mental representation. The definition by Zhou Liang helps to clarify the difference between Chinese chunks with words, phrase, idioms, construction, sentences and passages, and also classify all the chunks into three categories, namely fixed chunks, frame chunks and related chunks. With mixed measures, which are grammar, intuition and language database, thirty Chinese chunks are chosen to be the material for the next experiments. Through two experiments, it describes the mental processing and representation of Chinese chunks for medium and higher level foreign learners.Sixty overseas students who are studying in Nanjing participated in the two experiments, which are Online Phrase Judge Task and Self-paced Reading Experiment. Combined the theories of psycholinguistics and statistics, it reaches three conclusions, which are:(1)Chinese chunks may represent as a whole in the learners’ mental lexicon; (2) Learners at different levels will have different representation patterns for the Chinese chunks. The higher the Chinese level of the learner, the more likely Chinese chunks represent as a whole; (3) The types of chunks which are of different fixation may also have influence on the mental representation patterns for Chinese-learners, namely the more fixed the chunk, it is more likely to represent as a whole..However, some of the results show no difference in neither item-analysis nor participant-analysis, therefore this article only builds a hypothetical model, under which the medium-level learners represent the Chinese chunks as a whole, while the non-chunks piece by piece. And it is also the same as the representation of higher level students. Only fixed chunks are represented as a whole by medium-level learners, while the higher ones represent all the three types of chunks as a whole.