The Cognition Of Sound Symbolic Words For Chinese Native Speakers Who Are Learning English

Language is a tool of human’s thinking, which is closely connected with our daily lifeand our mental activities. Sound is one part of language and sound that is produced by peoplehas certain significance after being inferred and it contains profound physical reasons as wellas psychological reasons. Since the ancient times, there is a debate between sound andmeaning and it led to two completely different points of view. The sound and its meaning thatis non-linking is called arbitrary sound symbol and this view has been seemed as a dominanttheory for a long time. However, more and more scholars found that sound and its meaning isnot completely arbitrary through a large number of studies recently. They called thisphenomenon as sound symbolism. Since the17th century, more and more studies conductedby foreigners indicated that the meaning can reflect the sound, but studies that are similar tothis only have a few in China. Nowadays, many Chinese native speakers are beginninglearning English, we may have some questions such like this: sound symbolism exists or notexists when native speakers learning English; whether they can make use of sound symbolismwhen learning English or not.With these questions, we selected some Chinese native speakers, who are learningEnglish in university as participants and all of them has knowledge of English. This essayaims at analyzing whether Chinese native speakers exists sound symbolism when usingEnglish by checking the scores they guess or recognize sound symbolic words. This researchincludes three small experiments and all experimental materials are old English words. Themain task of this study is to understand the cognition of English sound symbolic words whenthese words are presented alone or presented in the context. We draw an important findingthat sound symbolism really exists for Chinese native speakers when they are learningEnglish. That is to say, Chinese native speakers can also make full use of sound symbolismwhen they learn English. As the idea that sound symbolism is not arbitrary still lacks ofspecific theory, we aim to testify it and offer some suggests for other researchers.From this study, we can draw the following conclusions:1. Compared with non-sound symbolic words, Chinese native speakers can guess andrecognize English sound symbolic words easier when these words are both presented inisolation.2. Compared with non-sound symbolic words, Chinese native speakers can guess English sound symbolic words easier when half of these words are presented in isolation andhalf of these words are presented in the context. In addition, when put sound symbolic wordsin the context, it will help people guess sound symbolic words better than using soundsymbolic words or the context alone.3. Sound symbolism does exist when Chinese native speakers who are learning English.4. The sound symbolism can provide a new view and method for English vocabularyteaching, both teachers and students can make use of sound symbolism.