Study On The Acquisition Of English Polysemous Words From The Prototypical Perspective

Polysemy is ubiquitous in natural language and it gains high attention oflinguists. However, the traditional researches of polysemous words excessivelyemphasize the internal factors of language and ignore the external factors. Accordingto the theory of cognitive linguistics, a polyseme can be viewed as a semanticcategory composed of its related meanings. With the guidance of cognitive linguisticsscholars have done a lot of researches about the polysemous word acquisition, andthese studies push forward learners to better understand polysemous words. However,the researches which study learning strategies and learning efficiency of polysemouswords with the guidance of prototype theory are rare in terms of empirical research.This study aims to explore Chinese college students’ polysemous word learningstrategies and to investigate the significance of prototype meaning in guessing andremembering the extended meanings of polysemous words. Questionnaire andvocabulary test are used as the main research methods.60students from Qingdao Hotel Management College are chosen as subjects todo the Polysemous Word Learning Strategies Questionnaire. They are required tofinish the task within20minutes. This questionnaire consists of personal information,learners’ knowledge of polysemous word acquisition as well as learning strategies.In vocabulary test part, the subjects are also chosen from Qingdao HotelManagement College. The100participants are randomly divided into two groups: thefirst group (provided with core meaning cue) and the second group (given non-coremeaning cue). The test tries to answer the following questions:(1) Is core meaningmore helpful than non-core meaning for students to guess the figurative meaning ofan unknown polysemous word?(2) Can core meaning make learners do better inshort-term and long-term retention of the figurative meaning of an unknownpolysemous word?The data of the questionnaire and the vocabulary tests are analyzed by SPSS16.0and Excel. The conclusions can be drawn as follows.Basing on the analysis of questionnaire data, we can see that the mostcommonly used learning strategy of polysemy is cognitive strategy. And in the sixsub-categories of the cognitive strategy, the most frequently used ones are guessingstrategy, association strategy and contextualization strategy.As for the test part, firstly, in the guessing test, the two groups show significantdifference. The group provided with the core meaning scores higher than the groupgiven non-core meaning. Secondly, there is no significant difference between the twogroups in the short-term retention test. Thirdly, the two groups have significantdifference in their performance in the long-term memory, the core-cued group scoressignificantly higher than the non-core-cued group. On the whole, the prototypemeaning is more advantageous in promoting learners to acquire the extendedmeanings of polysemous words.Based on the above conclusions, this study suggests that teachers shouldcultivate the students’ cognitive ability, strengthen students’ various learningstrategies. At the same time, teachers should teach polysemy under the guidance ofthe prototype theory, and pay more attention to the core meaning. They should teachstudents to master the core meaning first and then try to find the relationship of coremeaning and extended meanings so as to acquire polysemous words more efficiently.