以英語為外語學習者認知過程裡的詞組處理
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Date
2012-07-??
Authors
Ping-Yu Huang
David Wible
Chi-ting Chou
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
國立臺灣師範大學英語系
Department of English, NTNU
Department of English, NTNU
Abstract
近期研究顯示，以英語為第二語言 (ESL) 學習者在處理語言時，能夠如同第一語言使用者，展現對於詞組的內在處理優勢。本研究旨在驗證這項優勢，探究以英語為外語 (EFL) 學習者是否也能夠顯現這項優勢。這項探究的必要性在於，相較於ESL學習者，EFL學習者通常依賴書面式的語言輸入，而詞組在書面語言裡通常未被清楚地標明。三十位臺灣英語學習者參與這項實驗，當他們閱讀實驗材料 (包含詞組或詞組的最後一個字的句子) 時，眼球移動及凝視點等資料被即時地追蹤與記錄。研究結果指出，受試者在處理語料庫擷取出的字串時，展現了明確的優勢，但在處理諺語時則否。依據這些結果，我們說明EFL學習者如何藉由頻繁的語言接觸習得詞組，並根據探索式模式 (Gibbs, 1994)，討論EFL學習者學習英語諺語的困難。
Recent psycholinguistic experiments have demonstrated that ESL learners, as English L1 speakers, show an advantage for multi-word units (MWUs) during online language processing. In this study, we intended to re-examine this advantage and explore whether it was also shown by EFL learners. This exploration is important and worth undertaking because EFL learners differ from ESL learners in that the former rely mainly on written L2 input whereas MWUs generally are not specially marked in written texts. We exploited eye tracking techniques with sentences which contained either MWUs (corpus-derived lexical strings or common idioms) or the last words of the MWUs being presented as reading stimuli. Thirty Taiwanese EFL learners participated in this study with their eye movements and fixations being tracked when they read the test sentences. As the resulting data demonstrates, the participants showed almost no advantage when dealing with the MWUs. Taking a closer look at the data, however, we found that the participants did demonstrate a processing advantage regarding the corpus-derived strings but not for the idioms. Based on these findings, we propose an account of how EFL learners pick up and learn MWUs according to frequency-based models of language learning (Ellis, 2002) and describe a heuristic approach (Gibbs, 1994) to explaining why EFL learners encounter difficulties in learning English idioms.
Recent psycholinguistic experiments have demonstrated that ESL learners, as English L1 speakers, show an advantage for multi-word units (MWUs) during online language processing. In this study, we intended to re-examine this advantage and explore whether it was also shown by EFL learners. This exploration is important and worth undertaking because EFL learners differ from ESL learners in that the former rely mainly on written L2 input whereas MWUs generally are not specially marked in written texts. We exploited eye tracking techniques with sentences which contained either MWUs (corpus-derived lexical strings or common idioms) or the last words of the MWUs being presented as reading stimuli. Thirty Taiwanese EFL learners participated in this study with their eye movements and fixations being tracked when they read the test sentences. As the resulting data demonstrates, the participants showed almost no advantage when dealing with the MWUs. Taking a closer look at the data, however, we found that the participants did demonstrate a processing advantage regarding the corpus-derived strings but not for the idioms. Based on these findings, we propose an account of how EFL learners pick up and learn MWUs according to frequency-based models of language learning (Ellis, 2002) and describe a heuristic approach (Gibbs, 1994) to explaining why EFL learners encounter difficulties in learning English idioms.