Cognitive Process In English Confusable Word Acquisition

In the process of second language acquisition, confusable words are not only important but also difficult to be mastered, so it is necessary to explore the causes for word confusion in the cognitive process of second language acquisition. The previous studies have shown that the cognitive deficiency may lead to the occurrence of language errors. Thus based on the information processing system and psycholinguistic models of second language lexical acquisition, the input, processing, storage, and retrieval of English confusable words, i.e. the cognitive process of English confusable word acquisition, is analyzed, from which four causes for word confusion are abstracted: the characteristics of English confusable words, the cognitive process of human beings, the organization of mental lexicon, and the negative transfer of Chinese. And accordingly, five suggestions to avoid word confusion are proposed, i.e. getting some knowledge about English confusable words, strengthening the teaching of language and cultural differences, using English-English dictionary as reference, doing contrastive analysis, and adopting appropriate memory methods, so as to intensify and improve the efficiency of English confusable word acquisition.