Frequency Effects Between Visual Language Input And Oral Language Output

This thesis has been, within the paradigms of psycholinguistics, an attempt to investigate the effectsof input and output frequency on the oral repetition done by Chinese tertiarylevelEnglish majors.Specifically, it investigates the function input frequency has on language form and content in oralproduction as well as output frequency on the indices of language form and content. The input frequencywas operationalized as the task and language distributional frequencies between four groups while theoutput frequency was operationalized as the task frequencies within the group, different retelling byparticipants in GA. This study is an explorative one, with Chinese EFL learners as participants who are atthe intermediate level, and adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the datafrom two tasks, ROT and POT. The major findings are summarized as follows:i. Input frequency helped improve fluency, complexity and idea units of the passage to some degree,but it did not exert an influence upon accuracy. By contrast, as frequency of output increased, the numberof idea units stayed at the same level. Further, output frequency helped improve fluency and accuracy anddid not affect complexity much?ii.Language distributional frequency is also an influencing factor which exerted the joint effects onlanguage production and task frequencies, especially, the function in the lexical variability, syntacticcomplexity and lexical and syntactic substitution?iii. Three instances of language practice as input and output is the optimal amount?iv. Frequency is the one of the most important but not determining factor in language learning, whichis not compatible to the assumption of frequency proposed by Ellis (1994? 2002).Possible interpretations of the basic findings were rendered in the perspective of psycholinguistics. Inthe first place, varying times of language input and output can arouse attention to different dimensions oflanguage. Language forms and contents can be noticed and further, integrated into the longtermmemory.Therefore, different dimensions of language in production are enhanced to a certain degree. Secondly,enough frequencies of language input and output can make the language information being processed moreautomatized, that is to say, enough frequencies of language input and output can make the informationprocessed more syntacticbasedthan meaningbased.This thesis is composed of seven parts. The first chapter introduces the research objective, rationaleand the research questions. Chapter 2 reviews the related literature theoretically and empirically. Chapter 3 sets out to develop a theoretical framework of the research. Chapter 4 expatiates upon the research designincluding materials, participants, instruments, testing procedures and methods adopted for data collectionand analysis as well as the key results to answer the research questions. Chapter 5 presents a discussion onthe research findings. In Chapter 6, conclusions are drawn from the findings. And finally, pedagogicalimplications, limitations and suggestions for further related research are also outlined.