A Study On Referential Processing Of Chinese Redundant And Ambiguous Sentences By Thai Chinese Learners

Grice's cooperative principle is a classical theory in the field of pragmatics.The Maxim of Quantity.One of the four principles,requires that what is said should include all the information needed for the current conversation,and that what is said should not be more than what is needed.If the former is violated,information ambiguity will be caused,and if the latter is violated,information redundancy will be caused.Both Information ambiguity and redundancy will produce conversational implicature,which is not conducive to the smooth progress of communication.Referential anaphora refers to the phenomenon of anaphora in the utterance including referents,that is,the referents used in the referential expression have their corresponding objects in the previous text,and the referential expression needs to help the listener/reader select the appropriate objects to match in the previous text.According to Grice's criterion of quantity,the best amount of information in the utterance enables the process of referential anaphora to proceed smoothly and helps the listener to find the target referent.Conversely,the redundancy or ambiguity caused by the violation of "the Maxim of Quantity" will hinder sentence reference processing.Although "the Maxim of Quantity" has become the standard of discourse communication,it needs empirical research to find out whether violating the Maxim will hinder the real-time online language processing.There are two experiments in our study.We used E-Prime software,and word by word masking paradigm in moving-window technique to study the impact of information redundancy or ambiguity caused by the violation of the"the Maxim of Quantity" in the real-time processing of Chinese sentences,and to investigate whether online processing difficulties will occur when Chinese L2 learners read the sentences with information redundancy or ambiguity in Chinese,so as to verify the psychological reality of Gricean Maxim of Quantity.In this study,fifty-seven Thai Chinese L2 learners participated in the experiments.The experimental contents and results are as follows:The first experiment investigates the effects Chinese sentences with redundancy or ambiguity have on the processing of Chinese L2 learners.The results show that the subjects are very sensitive to the part with information redundancy,and the processing time in the critical part of redundant sentences is significantly longer than that of non-redundant sentences.This indicates that information redundancy will immediately interfere with their sentence processing,and the redundancy effect continues to affect the processing of the subsequent parts of sentences.On the contrary,the processing time of critical parts of ambiguous sentences is not delayed,even shorter than that of unambiguous sentences,which indicates that information ambiguity does not immediately interfere with the sentence processing.The experimental results support "the redundancy first hypothesis".Since information ambiguity does not immediately affect online sentence processing,we believe that L2 learners' language processing is not strictly guided by "the Maxim of Quantity"On the basis of the first experiment,the second experiment further studies whether the influence of information redundancy on online sentence processing is universal,and verifies whether the immediate effect of information redundancy on sentence processing is related to lexical semantic features.In the second experiment,we added color adjectives to investigate the sentence processing under conditions of reading redundancies of color modifiers as well as size modifiers.The results show that both color redundancies and size redundancies can immediately interfere with the referential processing of L2 learners.It shows that for Chinese L2 learners,information redundancy has universal interference to reference processing.In addition,we find that interference of color redundancies to sentence processing is much stronger than that of size redundancies,which is the opposite of previous studies.We think it may be related to the native language of the subjects,the differences between Chinese and English and so onThere is a great controversy in the academic domain about the influence of information redundancy and information ambiguity on sentence processing,including three viewpoints:the strong version of the Gricean hypothesis,ambiguity first hypothesis and redundancy first hypothesis.These studies mainly focus on the Indo-European languages represented by English,and there is still a gap in the research of Chinese referential processing of sentences with information redundancy and information ambiguity,which especially lacks the experimental evidence of Chinese L2 learners.The two experiments in this paper fill in this gap,and broaden the research scope of referential processing of sentences with information redundancy and information ambiguity.This paper proves that the language processing of Chinese L2 learners is not strictly guided by Gricean Maxim of Quantity from the perspective of Chinese,and challenges Gricean Maxim of Quantity with new experimental evidence.This study also proves that the influence of information redundancy on Chinese L2 learners is universal,and the influence of lexical semantic features on sentence processing should take native language background,significance of visual information and language differences into account.In addition,the two experiments in this study prove that in the sentence processing of Chinese as a second language,pragmatic information affects sentence processing,and referential context has an important impact on Chinese L2 learners.Second language learners can use contextual information and make pragmatic inference just like native speakers.However,it can be seen from the different processing performance of Chinese L2 learner on information redundancy and information ambiguity that the influence of information redundancy on second language processing is earlier and more obvious.