A Psycholinguistic Approach To Texture In Cloze

This thesis mainly studies texture in cloze text from the perspective of psycholinguistics through the integrated analysis of theory and experiments. Psycholinguistic theory about discourse comprehension is the main theoretical framework in this thesis. Psycholinguistics is the combination of psychology and linguistics; the theory about discourse comprehension is of great worth for English discourse study. From psycholinguistic perspective, discourse study mainly includes comprehension of discourse, memory of discourse and schema and discourse processing. In the study of comprehension of discourse, the major distinction between discourse study and sentence study is discourse coherence, which consists of local coherence and global coherence. Cohesion, thematic structure and information structure devote to the coherence of discourse. While in memory of discourse, the memory is influenced by the individual ability of working memory and the background information of the readers. There are three ways to store discourse, namely surface representation, propositional representation and situational models, and each appears to be influenced by different variables and subject to different decay rates and quantities of information. In the processing of discourse, schemata play an important role. A schema is a structure in semantic memory that specifies the general arrangement of a body of information, so it helps to understand the global coherence of discourse. One may have difficulty understanding the text when he doesn't have or can not activate the proper schemata in his semantic memory.Texture is an important aspect in the scope of text analysis in Halliday's Systemic-functional linguistics. It is something that can make a passage a unified whole; but texture is not something that is inherent in a passage. That is to say, texture should be built before a passage or a group of sentences could be called a text. The creation of texture can be realized in three aspects, namely, thematic structure, information structure and cohesion.Cloze discourse, as the study object of this thesis, is a special kind of discourse. It demands the testees to reestablish the texture according to the discourse features and their own knowledge. In this thesis, the author designed a series of experiments suitable for cloze discourse under the help of the previous psycholinguistic experiments studies. The results showed that the psycholinguistic theories about discourse comprehension can greatly help the reestablishment of texture in cloze discourse.The psychological study of language depends much on the data gained from the psychological experiments. In this thesis, the author first introduces some famous psychological experiments done by the previous scholars. The conclusions drawn from these experiments are of great benefit to the study. Then according to the previous experiments and the need of the study in this thesis, the author tries to design three experiments corresponding to the relevant aspects of the analysis about cloze. From the experiment results and the integrated analysis, this thesis concludes that the psycholinguistic theories about discourse comprehension can offer great help in cloze comprehension.