Research On Listening Comprehension Process From The Perspective Of Neurocognitive Linguistics

As one of the four basic language skills,listening comprehension plays a vital role in language communication and learning,serving as one of the toughest skills to master for foreign language learners.Substantially speaking,listening comprehension is a dynamic cognitive process which requires listeners to perceive voice signal,convert it into their own understanding and form meaningful output.This process is concerned about the operation mechanism of language in human brain.According to neurocognitive linguistics,language is an information system in neural network where language information is connected through different kinds of relations.In this complicated system,there are sub-networks such as lexical,syntactic and conceptual-semantic networks,the interaction of which exactly constitutes the process of listening comprehension.Based on the research about listening comprehension at home and abroad,very few has been conducted from the perspective of neurocognitive linguistics and performed on the correlation of inside layers of listening comprehension,which greatly obstructs the improvement of learners' listening training efficiency.In consideration of the above,the present research aims to explore the correlation among word recognition,sentence comprehension and text comprehension,as well as the efficient devices to check learners' listening comprehension from the perspective of neurocognitive linguistics.Adopting an empirical method,the writer conducts a follow-up research in a domestic university on 58 students who are first-year English majors from two parallel classes,recording target students' listening practice out of class and analyzing the diagnostic tests in class.After that,SPSS 22.0 is employed to analyze the data from the tests.Besides,the data collection covers 18 weeks.Research findings are listed as follows:(1)Regression analysis shows that word recognition has small direct impact on both sentence comprehension and text comprehension.The comparison between bivariate correlation analysis and partial correlation analysis indicates that word recognition holds indirect impact on text comprehension through sentence comprehension.(2)According to regression analysis,word recognition and sentence comprehension together could contribute 24%of the variance of text comprehension while word recognition can only contribute 8.6%of the variance of sentence comprehension.There are other factors,such as speech rate,listeners' reaction abilities,short-term memory,affecting learners'comprehension.The study thus concludes that:(1)While target students regard vocabulary as one of the greatest listening obstacles,it turns out that at the early stage(mainly in the first 6 weeks),the main comprehension obstacle in listening lies in the inequality of perceived sounds and meaning,due to which efficient relational networks among word,sentence and text fail to establish.(2)The master of pronunciation,form and meaning of word lays the foundation for listening comprehension.However,memory training alone cannot effectively improve listening comprehension ability.(3)Productive items in listening exercises could efficiently check learners' understanding,the design of which is supposed to put emphasis on logical relationships between questions.Besides,meaning-oriented output training contributes to the improvement of learners' thinking pattern in target language,and this helps learners with their listening comprehension especially in foreign language learning context.