中国学生对英语名词可数性习得研究

Acquisition of English count and mass nouns by Chinese EFL learners

本研究试图从心理语言学角度考察中国学生习得英语名词可数性特征的特点,分属中等水平和高水平的受试参加了改错任务和启动词汇判断任务。结果显示:第一,中国学生对英语名词可数性特征的判断显著受到汉语量词可数性的中介作用影响;第二,他们对名词可数性的判断不稳定,易受实验任务的影响;第三,与英语本族语者相比,中国学生对可数性语义的通达和提取是有意识、非自动的过程。据此,本文假设:中国学生名词词目中的英语可数性信息可能是缺失的,他们对此类信息的表征很大程度上依赖情景记忆系统。

The present study examines the acquisition of English count and mass nouns from the perspective of psycholinguistics,with a view to tapping into the representational properties of English count and mass nouns in the learners'mind.Participants are intermediate and advanced Chinese EFL learners who are invited to finish an editing task and a primed lexical decision task,respectively.Results show that 1)participants' countability judgments of English nouns are significantly mediated by the semantics of Chinese classifiers,and also task-dependent;2)their access to the countability of English nouns is not an automatic process compared with that of English native speakers.Based on these findings,we hypothesize that Chinese EFL learners,in their understanding of English nouns,are not explicitly aware of the count-mass distinctions,the manifestation of which is likely to be episodic in nature.