Experimental Research On Polysemous Morphological Awareness Of Learners From Non-chinese Character Cultural Sphere

Polysemy is a characteristic of Chinese morphemes. It is recognized as achallenge for foreign students to acquire the usage of polysemous morphemes,especially for those who do not have Chinese character cultural background. Thisexperimental research takes learners of beginner and intermediate levels fromnon-Chinese character cultural sphere as the subjects of study. By conducting a seriesof tests, it aims to study on morphological awareness from the polysemousperspective through the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The testsare comprised of two parts. The first part involves two individual tasks: MorphemeDistinguishing Test and Word Interpreting Test. Task one is designed to determinewhether foreign students have developed polysemous morphological awareness,whereas Task two is designed to measure the degree of it as well as the students’output capability of polysemous morphemes. The second part is based on athree-factor mixed complex design which concerns type of morphological meaning,word-forming ability and Chinese language level, aiming to find out which factorsinterfere in the determination of polysemous morphemes. The research concludes thatlearners from non-Chinese character cultural sphere have developed preliminary polysemous morphological awareness at beginner level, yet it maintains to be frail andimmature featured by the insufficient output performance. Moreover, the research hasalso found that Chinese language level is proved to be a decisive factor dedicating tothe processing of polysemous morphemes, in which the intermediate learnersoutperform the beginners. Besides, a significant combined effect has been detected inthe interaction between the other two factors, which are type of morphologicalmeaning and word-forming ability. Based on the above findings, the research hasprovided some suggestions for the teaching of polysemous morphemes.