On L2Word Collocation Representation And Lexical Access In E-C Interpretation

The study of word collocation has been a very heated topic in English teaching and has been studied by the linguists for decades. Recently, some cognitive linguists and psycholinguists have showed a great and strong interest in it. Based on the previous studies, this thesis aims to explore the effect of L2word collocation (collocation form and collocation meaning) representation of different L2levels on lexical access in E-C interpretation from the psycholinguistic perspective. The study includes two experiments:Experiment1attempts to make the judgment about the collocation form and collocation meaning of word collocation, and the computer records the answer and response time automatically. Experiment2is a test of E-C sentence interpretation and the computer records the response time of lexical access and target language of different L2subjects. The lexical access quality is mainly judged in terms of the fluency (RT) and accuracy rate (Interpretation Score) in E-C interpretation. The experiment contains60subjects,20of whom are from Yancheng Wuyou High School in Grade Two,20students from freshmen and another20students from juniors of Foreign Studies of Yangzhou University majoring in English respectively. The study mainly discusses the following three questions:1) What are the developmental features and routes of L2word collocation’s representation (incl. collocation form&collocation meaning) among the students of different L2proficiency levels (viz., middle-school students, university freshmen and juniors)?2) What kind of effect do the developmental features and routes in L2word collocation have on the lexical (collocation form&collocation meaning) access in translation, in terms of speed and accuracy?3) What is the cognitive-psychological model of accessing word collocation representation during the process of E-C interpretation?With the help of the statistical analysis of SPSS16.0, the following major findings are drawn by employing the statistical methods, namely mean, paired sample T-tests and one-way ANOVA.1) The representation quality of L2word collocation of learners of different L2proficiency levels manifests a developing tendency as a whole, namely, the representation quality of L2word collocation improves significantly as the L2proficiency level grows. Results of within-group comparisons reveal that the representation quality of collocation form is better than that of collocation meaning. In addition, results of between-group comparisons show that there exist statistically significant differences between the representation of collocation meaning while differences are not statistically significant between the representation of collocation form. That is to say, the developmental route of L2word collocation representation of learners of different L2proficiency levels is that the development of collocation meaning is quicker than that of collocation form.2) The representation of L2word collocation of Chinese EFL learners are positively and highly correlated with the lexical access in E-C interpretation. In other words, the higher the representation quality of L2word collocation is, the higher the lexical access quality is in E-C interpretation and the quicker the response time of L2word collocation, the faster the speed of lexical access is.Finally, the thesis also points out some limitations in the present study and meanwhile puts forward some pedagogical implications and suggestions for English teaching. For example, Chinese EFL learners’awareness of collocations should be enhanced, more kinds of word collocation should be focused on and learning words should not be isolated from context, which aims to offer some help for the future English teaching.