The Influence Mechanism Of Formulaic Sequences On English Listening Comprehension Of Advanced Chinese Learners Of English

Speech comprehension is a positive thinking process which is influenced by many factors.Formulaic sequences（FSs）,a kind of lexicalized language structure play an important role in the process of listening and comprehension.They are stored and retrieved as a whole and applied frequently.Many scholars have focused on the influence of FSs on language output and reading mainly focusing on the mental processing of FSs per se.However,in the field of L2 research,few study has been found on the interaction between FSs and its subsequent elements of sentences syntactically for comprehension from the perspective of auditory input.The present study,focusing on the three parameters involving frequency,transparency and familiarity,applying the theories of language information processing（LIP）,usage-based linguistics and Trace Model as its theoretical framework,taking advantage of the experimental paradigm of word and sentence recall（Gui,2000）targeted the advanced Chinese learners of English as the investigation object,made an attempt to explore: What was the pairwise relationship among the variables of FS frequency,FS transparency and FS familiarity? How did they influence the retrieval level of FSs? And how did FSs of different frequency interact with the subsequent syntactic components in the process of processing and understanding?Research results demonstrated roughly that:1)The transparency and familiarity of FSs had an intermediate or high positive correlation with the processing level of FSs per se.The frequency had a positive effect on vocabulary processing,but no significant correlation with the familiarity of advanced Chinese learners of English,which showed that there was still a gap between the token frequency and the natural frequency of vocabulary for them.2)There was no significant correlation between the retrieval level of FSs and that of SSW and SSS.But the retrieval level of SSW influenced that of SSS significantly.3)By investigating the combinations of FSs and its SSW of different frequencies,it was found that high-frequency FSs had a certain degree of inhibition on the processing of its subsequent components.For the SSW of a certain frequency,the higher the frequency of FSs appearing before it,the lower the level of retrieval of SSW.On the contrary,for a certain frequency of FSs,with the increase of the frequency of SSW,the level of retrieval of it tended to increase.The research results are of reference value for enlarging the field of mental lexicon research,enriching the understanding of speech comprehension process and adjusting the ideas and methods of language teaching.