An Experimental Study On The Understanding Of Chinese Literal Meaning By International Students

Four on-line and off-line experiments were conducted to systematically investigate the understanding tendency and influencing factors of Chinese literal meaning(minimal meaning and enriched meaning)of overseas students with different Chinese proficiency levels,and further reveal the cognitive processing mechanism and its dynamic development of international students' understanding of Chinese literal meaning.The results show that:(1)The enriched meaning is a part of the literal meaning.The literal meaning is not strictly limited to the research scope of semantics as stated by Grice,but belongs to the cross-research level of semantics and pragmatics.(2)In the process of understanding the literal meaning of a single sentence,the primary and intermediate level students' first response may be the most minimal meaning,but due to the deficient cognitive context,the primary and intermediate level students do not have the consciousness of distinguishing between " minimal meaning" and "enriched meaning".For advanced level overseas students,the activation speed of the minimal meaning and the enriched meaning is similar,but the rich cognitive context determine that advanced level overseas students have the consciousness of distinguishing the two meanings and tend to choose the enriched meaning to represent the literal meaning of Chinese.(3)In the monolingual environment,overseas students have different understandings of the literal meaning of the five types of Chinese,which are mainly influenced by three factors.The first is that the literal itself encodes meaning;Second,the "cognitive context" affected by the language level of foreign students;Third,Levinson's "information principle/the normal relationship".After providing the specific context outside of a single sentence,international students will have different understanding for the same single sentence,and the specific context becomes the fourth factor that affects the understanding of the literal meaning of international students.These four factors compete and influence each other in the process of literal meaning understanding,which also proves the role of cognitive context in literal meaning understanding.(4)Finally,according to the analysis of cognitive processing,the international students at the primary and intermediate levels conform to the "LFS" pragmatic processing mode,and the international students at the advanced level conform to the "LPP" pragmatic processing mode,showing the dynamic development trend from the "LFS" mode to the "LPP" mode.The above model is helpful to understand the cognitive characteristics of international students in understanding the literal meaning of Chinese and to concretize their thinking and psychological activities in the process of understanding the literal meaning.