The Influence Of Temporal Conjunctions On Pragmatic Processing In Chinese-English L2 Learners

In the process of English learning,Chinese learners usually treat the same concepts in English and Chinese as equivalents,because English temporal conjunctions are very similar in semantics to Chinese's.Chinese English learners understand and pragmatically process temporal conjunctions according to Chinese thinking.However,due to the differences in the cognitive models and processing mechanisms of temporal conjunctions by Chinese English learners and native English speakers,and the uncertainty of the occurrence of events in temporal conjunction sentences,it will make it difficult for readers to reconstruct the situation model.The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of different conjunctions on the pragmatic processing of Chinese English learners,reveal the laws of the role of mother tongue transfer in English learning,and provide reference evidence for English teaching and learning efficiency.This thesis uses the Concept Transfer Theory,Iconicity Assumption and Cognitive Load Theory as the theoretical framework.60 undergraduate and graduate students majoring in English at Northwest Normal University are selected as research subjects to participate in this experiment.They are divided into high-level group and low-level group based on the results of LexTALE online test.Taking the most representative temporal conjunctions“before”and“after”as an example,an online measurement program---self-paced reading based on E-prime2.0 software is used.The collected raw data was imported into SPSS 22 to establish a mixed effect model.The thesis attempts to explore the influence of different temporal conjunctions on pragmatic processing for Chinese English learners,and try to answer the following three questions:(1)How do temporal conjunctions influence sentence understanding?(2)How do temporal conjunctions influence pragmatic processing?(3)Is there any relationship between foreign language proficiency and the influence of temporal conjunctions on pragmatic processing?The results of the mixed effects model showed that for high-level groups,the main effect of conjunctions,the main effect of world knowledge congruence and their interaction at the 7~thh region are significant.For the low-level group,the main effect of conjunctions is not significant at 7th region,the main effect of world knowledge congruence and their interaction at 7 the region are significant.In the other 6 regions of the two groups,neither the main effect nor the interaction effect was significant.Further analysis of the data led to the following conclusions:(1)When the world knowledge is congruent,the second language learner takes longer to read the“before”sentence than the“after”sentence.According to the iconicity assumption,because the order of mentioning of the“after”sentence is consistent with the that of events,while the order of the“before”sentence is inconsistent,so the“before”sentence needs more time to understand.However,when there are incongruence in the world knowledge,the reading speed of the“after”sentence is slower than that of the“before”sentence.This conclusion is different from that of previous studies of native English.This is because Chinese and English have different temporal cognitive models.The subjects receive the influence of concept transfer in the process of understanding conjunctions and need more cognitive resources.(2)For the“after”sentence,the response time of the incongruent world knowledge is significantly longer than that of the congruent world knowledge.For the simpler semantic relationship of“after”sentence,participants only need to invest less cognitive resources,and put more cognitive resources into pragmatic information for deep processing.For the“before”sentence,whether the world knowledge is congruent or not does not affect the reading time.The sequence described in the“before”sentence is opposite to the actual sequence of events.The subjects need to perform an additional"reverse"operation,and the false information requires the subjects to have a"negative"cognitive operation,which increase cognitive complexity.They need to devote part of their energy to the processing of complex semantic relationships,and can only invest limited cognitive resources into the processing of pragmatic information.(3)The influences of temporal conjunctions on English learners'pragmatic processing are not significantly different between the two groups.On the one hand,although there is a significant difference in test scores between the two groups,there may not be substantial differences in learning styles and processing strategies between the two groups.On the other hand,according to the shallow structure hypothesis,the syntactic and pragmatic processing of second language learners is fundamentally different from that of native speakers.In addition,in the laboratory test environment,the test process is easily disturbed by uncontrollable non-verbal factors.According to the above results,in order for Chinese English learners to better learn and master temporal adverbial clauses in different cultural backgrounds,second language teachers should(1)raise cultural awareness and face differences correctly.(2)show as many habitual expressions as possible during the teaching process.(3)appropriately give targeted guidance and practice to students'over-reacted sentences.