A Cognitive Study Of The Acquisition Of Polysemous Words In SLA

The multiple senses of a word often cause problems and confusion for people especially for the second language learners. There are a lot of studies showing that the acquisition of polysemous words is far worse than that of other types of words. From the traditional linguists’ point of view, different senses of a polysemous word are unrelated and unsystematic, which causes confusion and increases memory burden for second language learners. However, cognitive linguistic studies have suggested that the multiple senses of a polysemous word are related to one another by means of such general cognitive mechanisms as metaphor, metonymy, image-schema etc.Based on modern cognitive theories and former empirical studies, this thesis makes a tentative study on the acquisition of polysemous words of Chinese learners of English. The study focuses on the students’comprehension of the polysemous words students learned in the class and new polysemous words in sentence context based on the prototype theory, the metaphorical and metonymic extension of polysemous words.In Experiment1, there is an experiment group and a control group in which the students in the experiment group are provided with the explanation of the cognitive mechanisms behind the polysemous words they are taught and the students from the control group are provided with the traditional teaching of the polysemous words:the Chinese meaning and an example sentence.101senior2students from two intact classes attended Experiment1which consists of a short-term retention test and a long-term retention test to find whether the explaining of cognitive relationships among different senses promote learners’ short-term retention test and long-term retention test of the target words. In Experiment2, there is an experiment group and a control group in which the students in the experiment group are provided with the explanation of the cognitive mechanisms behind the polysemous words they are taught and the students from the control group are provided with the traditional teaching of the polysemous words:the Chinese meaning and an example sentence.100senior2students from two intact classes attended experiment2which consists of a guessing test, a short-term retention test and a long-term retention test to find whether the enhancement of the metaphorical sense will promote learners’guessing of the extended meanings of a polysemous word when providing a core meaning, and whether the metaphorical sense will promote learners’short-term and long-term retention of the guessed words.The statistics of Experiment1show that learning of the cognitive mechanisms behind the polysemous words not only promote second language learners’ short-term retention but also promote their long-term retention of the target words. the statistics of Experiment2show that the enhancement of the learning of the cognitive mechanisms behind the polysemous words could promote second language learners’ guessing of the extended meanings of a polysemous word, but the experiment doesn’t show it could help the learner’s short-term and long-term retention of the extended meanings of a polysemous word.