A Study On Cognitive Contrast Between Chinese And English Spatial Preposition Acquisition

It is difficult for L2learners to master prepositions. For the Chinese students, they usually learn prepositions by memorizing the meanings and usage of prepositions without understanding. As for the foreign students, the acquisition of Chinese prepositions is also a puzzle. ESL learners make various mistakes during the acquisition of Chinese and English prepositions as the acquisition of Chinese and English prepositions is not only concerned with language itself. Spatial categorization is both universal and language-and culture-specific (Patricia, Boquist2009).Most of the scholars made a contrast between English preposition and Chinese preposition from the perspective of English language itself, such as the usage of English and Chinese prepositions, the position in the sentence and their classification, characteristics and other point of view. In addition, most of previous papers about prepositional acquisition of cognitive linguistics are concerned with one language. As Becker&Carroll (1997) indicates the acquisition of prepositions is not concerned with language itself. During the process of prepositional acquisition, we not only learn the word form and meanings of spatial prepositions, but also compare the special cognitive system of the mother language and target language. Then, we reconstruct the process of the cognition and establish a new special categorization and cognitive system to adapt to target language.This study is based on the theory of spatial categorization taking the perspective of people’s understanding and application of spatial prepositions in order to study the cognitive differences between Chinese and English spatial prepositions. The study employed qualitative methodology to study the differences between English and Chinese spatial prepositions. The subjects of this study consists of60Chinese students from Grade one of the No.1middle school of Zhangzi in Changzhi city, Shanxi province and15foreign students from institute of international education of Tianjin University. After data analysis and discussion, the author summarized the linguistic and cognitive factors that influence the acquisition of Chinese and English prepositions. Linguistic factors1) The Chinese prepositions are derived from Chinese verbs and most of English prepositions are conventional and fixed, such as at, for, in, of, on.2) English and Chinese all belong to the type of SVO language, but, the positions of their prepositions are very different.3) The usage of the English prepositions is compulsory respectively, and the English prepositions are usually not eclipsed in sentences. Cognitive factors1) the English prepositions have much rich meanings than Chinese prepositions;2) The English/Chinese prepositions share the same meanings with each other, which cause problems to acquire English/Chinese prepositions.3) The buildings in these two countries have the different physic frame thus the two languages have different spatial dimensions for the same scenes.4) The people from two different cultures have different choice of object of reference.The present study also has its limitations. For example, the number of the subjects is respectively small, especially the English-speaking subjects in Chinese test. So the study should be improved. According to the statement of Judithet al,(Judith, McLaughlin&Darren,Tanner2010) second language learning and language progressing are concerned with neural correlates. So the author wishes this study can be researched from the perspective of cranial nerve to make this study more accurate.