A Comparative Study Of Temporal Information Processing In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

By comparing Chinese and English cartoon descriptions of Chinese ESL learners with those of native speakers of American English,this thesis analyzes the similarities and differences of Chinese and English temporal information processing from the perspective of language transfer.The subjects are native speakers of American English from the sixth grade of a primary school in the United States and Chinese English learners in a university in Hebei Province who are majored in English.After eliminating the invalid data,156 valid subjects were divided into three groups: 26 native speakers of American English and 130 Chinese English learners.Among them,Chinese English learners were divided into two groups.One group used English descriptions first and then Chinese descriptions,the other group did the opposite.Considering the ability of the subjects to understand the content of the test,the content of the test task was determined to be two cartoons in Father and Son,a popular family comic book in the world.And the similarity between the two selected comics in content is ensured,so that the content of the comics is easy for the students to understand.The data was retrieved immediately after the descriptions were completed.With the help of three other students,the collected data was carefully noted.SPSS 17.0 and Antconc were used to analyze the test data of the three groups of subjects.The purpose of this study was to explore the similarities and differences of the use of tenses between the descriptions of Chinese English learners and English native speakers.This paper also analyzes the error rate of inflectional change of Chinese English learners' English writing and American English native speakers'.Log-likelihood Calculator 1.0 was used to calculate the log-likelihood ratio,and the similarities and differences between English and Chinese temporal information processing are analyzed.The results show that:(1)For the same cartoon,the past tense is mostly used in both Chinese and English descriptions by Chinese English learners and English native speakers;(2)Pragmatic words,temporal adverbials and inflectional morphemes are used in both Chinese and English descriptions to express temporal information by Chinese English learners.However,in Chinese descriptions,the inflectional morpheme “le” is often used to express thepast time,while in English descriptions,both pragmatic words and temporal adverbials are used more frequently to express the concept of time.(3)The English descriptions of Chinese English learners has no significant difference in the use of pragmatic words and inflectional morphemes compared with native English speakers,but Chinese English learners use more temporal adverbials expressions;(4)Compared with native English speakers,Chinese English learners have significantly higher rate of errors in inflectional change of verbs than native English speakers.The results show that although the time concepts of human beings are generally similar,there are still significant differences between L2 and L1 learners in the processing of time concepts: Although L2 learners have generated the concepts of inflectional morphemes,they have not yet reached the level of native English speakers in output expression.