On The Process Of Discourse Comprehension Within The Framework Of Connectionism

Connectionism is one of the important research focuses both in cognitive science and neural science. Its alternative name is parallel distributed processing (PDP for short). It assumes that psychological phenomena could be elaborated by the interconnected networks consisting of interconnected units and nodes, and there are weights which are used to measure the strength of connections between the units. For Connectionism, those nodes exist in the form of interactive activation, which means that in language processing a multiplicity of nodes are activated by the arousal of a node to which they are connected. The process of interactive activation of Connectionism lays a solid foundation for language understanding and analysis.Based on the main ideas of Connectionism, this thesis makes a hypothesis:the whole discourse comprehension process (from the basic perception of the reading text to the analysis and interpretation of sentence structure, then to the understanding of the logic structure and at last to the discourse information storage and retrieval) accords with the main idea of Connectionist theory.Within the framework of Connectionism, this thesis adopts think-aloud protocol to conduct a comparative study between two contrastive groups (in all10non-English majors), which focuses on the four stages in discourse comprehension process. Think-aloud Protocol is generally recognized as a major source of data on subjects’cognitive processes in specific tasks and has been a large increase of the studies that investigate cognitive processes. Other resources of data in the thesis come from the questionnaire, reading scores and retrospective interviews. Then all the collected data are put into SPSS19.0(Statistical Package for Social Sciences19.0) to undergo objective and scientific analysis. From the experiment, this thesis proves the hypothesis that the whole discourse comprehension process accords with the main idea of Connectionist theory. More detailed conclusion could be drawn from the research:in the whole interconnected network of discourse comprehension, the bigger the weight among the nodes in discourse comprehension is, the smoother the reading process is and accordingly the higher the scores are gained in the reading test. At the same time, the results of the research suggest that English discourse comprehension teaching should train students actively and tactically to construct information in the information network.This thesis is only a tentative step toward the correlation between Connectionism and discourse comprehension research. Therefore, there is still much room for its future development. Limitations of this study and suggestions for further research are discussed at the end of this thesis.This research, on the one hand, enriches the scope of the application of the Connectionist theory; on the other hand, is of pedagogical value for shedding light on English discourse comprehension teaching.