Study Of English Noun-Noun Combination Understanding Guided By Carin And Dual Process Theories

Conceptual combination is an important issue in cognitive science, which plays a significant role in the study of linguistics and cognition. It reflects the changing reality of the language, embodies the combining abilities of language, expands language functions, enhances language creativity and improves language development. The noun-noun combination, a commonest form of the conceptual combination, highlights itself in the study of conceptual combination not only due to its flexible form and concise expression but also due to the complicated process of meaning construction it implies in forming new concepts. Three major theories that explain the strategies used in understanding noun-noun conceptual combination and the factors that affect the understanding of noun-noun conceptual combination have been formulated. They are: schema-modification theory, dual process theory and the CARIN Theory. The previous researches on interpretation of noun-noun combination focus on the native English speakers. In other words, most researches up to now are based on the cognitive process of people's native language. The empirical study on the understanding of foreign language conceptual combination in our country has not been reported in official academic journals owing to the fact that the computer software for large-scale collection of latency data is not available.This thesis is an experiment report. The participants of the research were selected by random sampling from the English postgraduates of College of Foreign Studies in Guangxi Normal University. The author modified the experimental materials used by Gagne in order to be better accustomed to the participants who learned English as a foreign language and who were at an advanced English level. The computer software for large-scale collection of latency data was employed to gather data of response time needed to interpret English noun-noun combinations and the concerning interpretations of these combinations. The research aims to find out what specific strategy advanced Chinese learners of English prefer in the interpretation of noun-noun combinations and it is intended to answer the following questions:1) Do advanced Chinese learners of English tend to interpret English noun-noun combinations via relation linking? 2) Is property mapping more difficult to occur than relation linking for advanced Chinese learners of English? 3) Will the use of property mapping in interpretation be primed due to the increased similarity between the constituents of the combination or the recent exposure to combinations which can be interpreted via property mapping? SPSS 11.5 is utilized to analyze valid raw data with descriptive and inferential methods.The three major findings of the present study are as follows:The first finding is that advanced Chinese learners of English tend to interpret English noun-noun combinations via relation linking and property mapping is not as frequently produced as should have been, and the processing time of the latter is significantly longer than that used for relation linking. Three factors may contribute to this phenomenon. Firstly, according to CARIN theory, the selection of relation occurs before the specification of properties. So long as the relation-linking interpretation is logical, Chinese learners of English may not bother to consider property-mapping based explanation. That is to say, only when relation linking cannot provide a logical interpretation, is property mapping adopted, which explains why property mapping needs more time to process. Secondly, in terms of CARIN theory, the proportion of noun-noun combinations based on property mapping in English is small compared with that based on relation linking, and the less opportunity to get familiar with such combinations makes it more difficult for Chinese learners of English to interpret them. Thirdly, the noun-noun combination based on property mapping is in itself ambiguous in meaning, so even the advanced learners of English feel perplexed to decide which property of the modifying noun should be mapped onto the head noun, thus increasing the burden of cognitive process and leading to more wrong interpretations. The second finding indicates that the immediate past appearance of a property-mapping based noun-noun combination does not produce priming effect on the interpretation of property mapping, as is predicted by the CARIN theory; and the increased similarity between the two nouns in the combination does not bring in priming effect either. That suggests that the low proportion of property mapping noun-noun combinations may cause learners'failure in recognizing them and since the similar nouns can play the similar role in a relation, the learners who are not familiar with property mapping may have difficulty in constructing a new concept through mapping, thus increasing the chance guessing of the explanation. The third finding is that property mapping is viewed as acceptable as relation linking, which contradicts the CARIN theory.The whole paper falls into six parts. Chapter One serves as a general introduction, including the background of research, the purpose of this research, questions to be answered and the layout of the paper. Chapter Two is the literature review in which some relevant and significant researches done by researchers in China and abroad are briefly summarized. Chapter Three covers the three experiment designs for the present research including goal of each experiment, materials, procedures, participants and instruments for data collection. Chapter Four describes the statistical findings of this experimental research. Chapter Five is devoted to the discussion and analysis of the experimental results. Chapter Six involves a brief conclusion, the implication and the limitation of this study.