Research On Uighur College Students’ Irony Cognitive Processing In Chinese

As a type of non-literal language,irony is commonly used in literature,television programs and daily conversations.The cognitive mechanism of irony is still controversial,let alone the bilingual research on irony which is rarely found in literature.As the standard spoken and written language in China,Chinese lays a solid foundation for consolidating the sense of community for the Chinese nation.In order to seek an answer to how minority bilinguals in China perform in irony comprehension in Chinese,four self-paced reading experiments and one eye-tracking study have been conducted,in which Uighur College students participated in these experiments,with Chinese native speakers as the controls.This study attempts to test how different factors influence Uighur College students’ ironic comprehension in the standard spoken and written Chinese language from the following three perspectives:linguistic factors(linguistic types),contextual factors(contextual clues)as well as cognitive factors(Chinese language proficiency).Through these experiments,the following findings have been obtained: firstly,the way for irony comprehension of Uighur college students is similar to that of their Han counterparts.Their RTs(reading times)for the commentary statements were significantly longer in the ironic condition than in the literal condition,regardless of whether the materials were presented to Uighur participants or Han participants.Secondly,Uighur College students found it more demanding in irony processing due to their poor Chinese proficiency,compared to their Han counterparts.Thirdly,influenced by Chinese language proficiency,Uighur College students performed differently from individuals in dealing with contextual information:intermediate-above level learners were able to integrate their recognition of the word with contextual clues,while elementary-level learners could not integrate linguistic processing with contextual factors.Besides,salient meaning retrieval and inference-making in irony comprehension were more likely to be revealed in Uighur College students than in Han participants.In the procedure of discourse comprehension,Uighur College students seemed to be more sensitive to the difficulty of irony comprehension than Han participants.However,due to the relatively low reading proficiency of Chinese,the Uighur students with low and intermediate-level proficiency in Chinese were also relatively low in meaning retrieval from the target language,which seems to be the biggest obstacle for them to process irony.In contrast,the Uighur participants with high proficiency in Chinese showed no significant difference from Han speakers in terms of meaning retrieval.However,compared with Han participants,even Uighur College students with higher proficiency in Chinese still had obstacles in the semantic integration of irony comprehension,and they still had difficulties in understanding irony.In conclusion,the cognitive mechanism of irony processing in Chinese is influenced and regulated by many factors,including three aspects.Firstly,linguistic types as the objective linguistic factor exert a great influence upon on the cognitive processing of irony in Chinese language;Secondly,contextual clues as the contextual factors,also as the objective linguistic factor,have a great influence on the cognitive processing of irony in Chinese language;Thirdly,as a subjective factor,Chinese language proficiency plays a crucially regulatory role in meaning retrieval of the key words and in semantic integration of contextual information in irony processing.By comparing the similarities and differences between Uighur students and Han students in Chinese irony processing,the thesis explores the characteristics of Uighur students’ cognitive processing of Chinese figurative language,discovers the difficulties Uighur students encounter in mastering the standard spoken and written language and roots out the reasons,which thus provides empirical support and theoretical supplement for the future study of bilingual figurative language processing.