Inhibition And Salience: A Cognitive Study Of Misunderstanding

The main research object is misunderstanding in the verbal communication. From the view of cognitive analysis, this thesis tries to illustrate the definition, classification, reasons and consequences of misunderstanding. Besides, we make a tentative systematic study on misunderstanding from the perspective of inhibition and salience in order to interprete the generating mechanism of misunderstandingMisunderstanding includes the misunderstandings of behavior, verbal language and written language from a broad view. Generally speaking, the focus of attention in most of the research fields is misunderstanding in the verbal communication. It is a phenomenon that the message the hearer receives is not in agreement with the speaker's meaning or the speaker's communicative intention. In other words, during the communication, the speaker does not transmit the message in an accurate way, and the receiver does not perceive the message in a correct way. In general, misunderstanding can be classified into two types: literal misunderstanding and situational misunderstanding. The former is usually caused by the lexical meaning of the utterance while the latter is usually caused by some deep reasons which are needed to probe into. Misunderstanding, pragmatic failure, non-understanding, misleading, and deliberate misinterpretation make up the big family of communication failure. The family members have certain similarity, consequently it is necessary to distinguish misunderstanding from other phenomena in the course of the study.Inhibition and salience are crucial for the emergence of misunderstanding. A legible venation is given to probe into misunderstanding. In a broad view, during a processing comprehension of utterances, successful communication will be made when the salient meaning from the hearer's comprehension corresponds to the speaker's communicative intention. However, the interlocutors can not always achieve it. Language comprehension is a procedure of construction and integration with Inhibition-salience. A net of joint frameworks can be constructed with various meanings of utterance. When the speaker transmits an informative intention, meanings from the net of joint frameworks will contribute to the exact meaning in the hearer's mind. In the above processing, the most salient meaning will be chosen for the comprehension result while other meanings will be inhibited. However, the salience in the language comprehension differs in degree, which cannot guarantee that the salient meaning will come to the speaker's communicative intention. It is also found that the information referring to the input utterance or the hearer's most familiar information gets the most salient degree. This kind of information can be regarded as presuppositions of the utterance's cognitive context. The presupposition will make the degree of salience change conditionally and create a piece of new salient information, hence the original salient information will be inhibited relatively. Therefore, the interpretation of the utterance will be affected. In this process, the presuppositions from the hearer are junctions between the prior context and situational context. Since the utterance interpretation is based on the hearer's prior context and the situational context, which will be interacted and integrated, and generate a piece of salient information from the prior context.Through the above analysis, Inhibition-salience Cognitive Model of Generating Misunderstanding is proposed in this essay. The involved parameters are original salient information, new salient information, inhibited information, communicative intention, presuppositions, prior context and situational context. The model assumes the following viewpoint: i. generally speaking, misunderstanding is produced because the salient and inhibited information in hearer's comprehension is not in accord with the speaker's intended information from both sides of salience and inhibition; ii. the cognitive context contains the prior context and the situational context, which give effects on the salient and inhibited information, and consequently the utterance comprehension result depends on the prior context; iii. the presuppositions act as the close junctions in the interaction between the prior context and situational context; iv. as a cognitive psychological mechanism, Inhibition-salience plays different roles in the prior context and situational context because of the distinct presupposition information; the interaction between the prior context and the situational context will make the salient meaning change the original intention into prior context oriented. The situational salient information will be inhibited as irrelevant information, which is the opposite poles of the speaker, and lead to a misunderstanding.