Concreteness Of English Words Ratings By Chinese EFL Learners

Words,as the basic constituent of language,are taken as the ideal interface of the studies between emotion and language.Words can not only express meanings but can also convey people’s particular emotion.Concreteness,as an important variable influencing semantic processing,is gathering pace among experts and has become a hot topic in this field.There has recently been an upsurge of research interest among researchers who paid close attention to the semantic processing of concreteness by adopting various paradigms(e.g.Behavioral,ERPs,f MRI,and eye movement)across a variety of cognitive tasks(e.g.lexical decision,word association,memory tasks,etc.)to fully investigate the semantic features of concreteness.However,studies over the years on concreteness mainly centered around native speakers,and much less attention has been paid to the features of concreteness for second language speakers.Therefore,based on the previous studies,the present study investigated the emotion-concreteness interaction and the differences of concreteness among word classes in Chinese EFL learners.The following two questions were addressed:(1)How is concreteness related to emotions in terms of valence,arousal,and dominance?(2)Does the concreteness differ among word classes? If yes,what are the differences?The word stimuli were selected from College English Test Band 4(CET-4)and Band 6(CET-6),which contained 4,030 common words rated on concreteness and the three emotional variables(valence,arousal,and dominance)by a total of 1,595 non-English majors,using the paper-and-pencil method.Based on data analysis,the study revealed that:(1)concreteness had significant correlations with valence,arousal,and dominance.More specifically,both valence and dominance were described as sharing a typical U-shaped(quadratic)relationship with concreteness;and arousal showed a positive linear relationship with concreteness.(2)Concreteness was significantly different among five word classes.The five classes could be ranked in a descending order of differences as follows: nouns,verbs,adjectives,function words,and adverbs.To sum up,the present study found the correlations of the emotional variables and concreteness as well as verified the differences of concreteness among word classes.It presents more detailed data and can be considered as an important supplement andextension to the theoretical and empirical studies on emotion and language.It can also further shed enlightenment on second language teaching and learning in China,especially for vocabulary teaching and learning.