Research On The Mental Representation Of Chinese Two-Character Word And The Application In Teaching

The role of morphology in the human language processing system has become an important topic of research in the cognitive psychology of language over the past a few decades. Varieties of researches have been done in order to solve the following questions:whether the access of whole words before the access of morphemes; how morphological information is stored in long-term memory; what connection is there between morphemes and words, and so on. Most of the current researches of lexicon structure and lexical processing in Chinese remain to concentrate on the subjects who are native speakers. The answer to the question of the mental representation model in Chinese of second language learner, however, is still unknown.In order to take a better look at the questions above, we tried to combine the cognitive linguistics research method with the Second Language Acquisition research. We first arranged a repetition priming experiment to discover the representation mode of both two-character words and morphemes. In the mean time, we also tried to reveal the main influential factors of the processing mode in the experimental study. Then we went on for an intensive research of the different behavior that the language learners tended to carry out in the cognition process of Chinese two-character words by a word-guessing experiment and the following surveys and interviews.Based on the research above, we applied our finding to the study of morpheme teaching method in Chinese vocabulary teaching. We tried to point out the necessity, scientificity and practicality of teaching morpheme in a more systematic way in class and provide some suggestions for instructional design and teaching material writing.