The Effects Of Four Sentence Contexts And Semantic Transparency On The Understanding Of Chinese Idioms For Advanced International Students

The paper uses both experimental methods（sentence‐priming technology and lexical decision task）and interviewing methods（interpreting the target Idiom） to examine the effects of four specific strong sentence contexts（Synonymous Context、Antonymous Context、Interpretative Context and Inferential Context） and semantic transparency on the understanding of Chinese Idioms for advanced level international students.30European‐American and Japanese‐Korean students participate in the research. The main discoveries in this study are as follows:1. Different type of contexts has different effects. As far as facilitation to understanding of Chinese Idioms for advanced international students is concerned, Synonymous Context> Antonymous Context>Neutral Context; and Interpretative Context≈Inferential Context>Neutral Context.2. Semantic transparency has strong influence on the understanding of Chinese Idioms for advanced international students. Transparent idioms are much easier to be understood than opaque idioms.3. Sentence contexts and semantic transparency interact to a certain degree. Only when in Synonymous Context and Inferential Context can semantic transparency influence idioms understanding, i.e. transparent idioms are much easier to understand than opaque idioms. While in antonymous context and interpretative context, the differences are not significant. Furthermore, from the descriptive statistics we deduced that opaque idioms are much easier to be understood in interpretative context than in inferential context.4. Inferential context facilitates while interpretative context interferes the understanding of idioms. The reason is that foreign students tend to use the inference strategy even in interpretative context.5. Compared to primary‐level and intermediate‐level students, advanced international students have more awareness of using different methods to interpret the meaning of idioms with different semantic transparency. For transparent idioms, they use more word morphology clues while for opaque idioms, more contextual clues are used.6. Much better interpreting was achieved with the integration ofcontextual and word morphology clues than using only one kind of clue.7. The aboveeffects show no significant difference among the learners with different language backgrounds. That means advanced international students have almost the same rules in idiom acquisition.Based on the results found above, we give specific advice pertaining to idiom teaching and learning. The findings can also support and enrich research on “the sentence context effect” theoretically.