认知语境视角下英语句法歧义句的意义建构

On the Meaning Construction of English Syntactic Ambiguous Sentences in the Perspective of Cognitive Context

以90名全日制大一学生为受试,运用基于选择和翻译两个任务的句法阅读测试,对认知语境在句法歧义句意义建构中的作用进行了研究。综合阅读测试、有声思维和访谈等三种研究方法所得出的结果表明:语言知识、情景知识和背景知识的内化能够加速句法歧义句的理解;共有的认知语境能够促进句法歧义句的意义建构;此外,认知语境会使句子理解的最大关联和最佳关联之间形成反差,从而限制歧义句的理解。最后提出,广大外语教师应该积极利用多媒体技术和教学环境,尽可能地扩大学生的认知语境,从而提高学生句法阅读的能力,继而提高篇章理解的能力。

Taking 90 freshmen as the subjects and using such kinds of syntactic reading tests as multiple choices and translation, the study is conducted to see how cognitive context affects the meaning construction of English syntactic ambiguous sentences. Results of syntactic reading test, think-aloud and face-to-face interview show： the internalization of linguistic knowledge, situational knowledge and background knowledge can fasten the understanding of syntactic ambiguous sentences; mutual cognitive context can facilitate the meaning construction of syntactic ambiguous sentences ; however, cognitive context can also give rise to a gap between the maximum relation and optimal relation, thus restrict the understanding. Finally, the idea was brought forward that English teachers should actively adopt multimedia technology and teaching environment to enlarge students＇ cognitive context, which will be helpful for students to improve syntactic reading ability ahd furthermore, discourse reading ability.