An Analyse On The Effect Of Cognitive Context On Speech Comprehension

Speech comprehension is the recipient in the speech communication who receives and gets the speaker's real intention through the reasoning of speaker's words, namely the process of communicative intention.Usually, the communication between people is can be carried out smoothly, that's to say the recipient can understand the communicative intention, while the occasion that the recipient fails to understand the speaker's real intention can also be existed. Whether the communication can be successful, it is under the influence of many factors, in which cognitive context is one of the important factors. This paper is going to analyze the function from the perspective of the cognitive context in the words come to talk about the role of understanding.This paper firstly introduces the current research status of the context both at home and abroad. Linguists Dan Sperber from France and Deirdre Wilson from Britain call context as contextual assumptions in their book Relevance:Communication and Cognition, and proposes "cognitive context" further. According to the different understanding of cognitive context from different scholars, referencing relevant theory of pragmatics, speech communication and psychology linguistics, this paper, combining needs of this paper, gives a definition to speech communication: Cognitive context is a connection of a series of fact or assumptions known by people that can be perceived and inferred. It is a psychological construct, usually consists of vocabulary, encyclopedic information, logical information and experience. Meanwhile the characteristics of cognitive context are discussed. Moreover this paper makes a definition of speech comprehension.Secondly, this paper writes about the process about how cognitive context plays role in verbal understanding, and borrows the Relevance Theory to expound in the process of how cognitive context plays role to the recipient in the process of understanding the speech. Thus can make the recipients have a better understanding of what the speaker really want to utterance, i.e. communicative intention. It further makes communication run smoothly.Finally,this paper attaches a great importance to the role of cognitive context to speech comprehension. This paper deeply discussed the important role played by cognitive context in communication process in following four aspects respectively: cognitive context's function on the explanation of discourse understanding and restraint, on inferring the pragmatic meaning, on understanding variation discourse, on completing the missing information.