口、笔译专业学生抑制控制能力发展的英语实证研究

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Language is not only a means of communication, but also the core of thinking andcognition. With the advancement of science, international exchanges become morefrequent and stronger, and more and more people are able to master two or morelanguages, and bilingualism has become an increasingly common social phenomenon.Therefore, language plays a very important role in cognitive linguistics. Early researchon bilingualism focused on exploring written processing or verbal comprehension. Inrecent decades, many studies have begun to examine the mechanisms of inhibitionperformance.
Green (1998) proposed a model of bilingual inhibitory control(hereinafter referredto as IC) based on the theoretical hypothesis of cognitive control. It is believed that inorder to select vocabulary according to the language label at the lexical level, thelanguage task diagram controlled by the attention supervision system will “selectively”suppress potential competitors. Based on this model, Green assumes that skilledbilinguals have higher bilingual IC than unskilled bilinguals. Zied (2004:254-256)conducted a study among older people and validated this hypothesis.
The study of bilingual IC belongs to the category of cognitive control researchand is a study on cognitive control in language level. Cognitive control is an internalcognitive mechanism that coordinates the relationship between action and currentcontext based on internal goals. Studies among children have found that bilinguallearning promotes cognitive development, but this promotion is influenced by the levelof the second language (L2) and the type of task.
.............................

1.2 Objectives
Previous researchers have conducted a lot of experiments on the differences in ICbetween monolinguals and bilinguals. But the following problems still need to besolved.
At present, the researches on inpidual differences in IC mechanisms at homeand abroad have involved different understanding ability, age, working memory,bilingual level, etc. The differences between different inpiduals are very obvious, but there are few development or longitude studies about the IC of the same inpidualafter training for a period, and the existing researches are more common in children’saspect. Moreover, domestic research on IC mostly explores the differences betweeninpiduals, and there is no specific study on the development of same inpidual IC.This study intends to conduct a longitude study on the students of the interpreting andtranslation majors who have participated in the Stroop Task an academic year ago, andexplore how they have changed their IC after an academic year of professionaltraining.
............................

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 IC Under Bilingual Conditions
Foreign researchers have proposed two cognitive models to explain theimportance of IC in the two languages that are commonly activated (Bialystok et al.,2005: 79-80). The first model is the bilingual interactive activation (BIA) proposed byDijkstra et al. (1998), which argues that competition between languages is decomposedby mutual inhibition of adjacent representations, so a specific response to the choicereduces the likelihood of choosing an adjacent response. The inhibition is determinedby the characteristics of the particular target language (Hu& Bai, 2008: 70-74). Thesecond model is the inhibition control model (IC) proposed by Green. This modelconsiders this system to manage the activation between competing language schemas.Bilinguals must perform IC on non-target languages so that the required languagesystems can participate in activities (Green, 1998: 67-81).
2.1.1 Definition of Inhibition and IC
As an academic term, inhibition refers to the mutual contrast between neurons.When the concept of inhibition is introduced into the cognitive field, it mainly refers tothe containment of the mental process or representation of the cognitive processingcenter of the inpidual or its reduced performance. Inhibition can be occurred duringthe attention maintenance phase of cognitive behavior, or it can occur during theimplementation phase of cognitive behavior. The former may be referred to as activeinhibition or proactive inhibition, and the latter may be referred to as reactiveinhibition or retroactive inhibition (Petrides, 2000; Braver, 2012).
.........................

2.2 Bilingual Level and IC
As researchers have become more and more extensive in IC research, there havebeen many studies on IC of different bilingual levels. The following authors discussand analyze the two parts of domestic and foreign studies.
2.2.1 IC& Different Bilingual Levels Abroad
In the study of the relationship between bilingualism and IC, there are manystudies represented by Bialysok, and most of the participants are children.
In 1998, Bialystok et al. conducted a non-semantic problem-solving task for 71children (average age of 9 years). The children participating in the experiment weremonolingual and bilingual (including unbalanced bilingual and balanced bilingualchildren). This experiment found that balanced bilingual children performed better thanunbalanced bilingual children and monolingual children when suppressing irrelevantinformation. Bialystok et al. (2004: 290-303) used a questionnaire experiment and aSimon task to test 40 participants, 20 of whom were elderly with an average age of71.9 years, and the remaining 20 were middle-aged people with an average age of 43years and included monolinguals and bilinguals. Their previous studies on children’sIC found that the bilingual’s IC increased first in the backward trend, and they alsofound that the bilingual ability of older people compared with other peers is slowlyrecessing. Bialystok’s study of monolingual and bilingual children found that bilingualchildren’s inhibition of irrelevant information outperformed monolingual children(Bialystok, 2006: 56-62).
Zied et al. compared the IC of young and old bilinguals. It is found thatinpiduals with low bilingual level have their ability to suppress and control declinewith age; while inpiduals with higher bilingual levels have little change in theircontrol ability with age. (Zield et al., 2004: 254-256).
.............................
Chapter 3 Methodology............................17
3.1 Research Questions................................... 17
3.2 Method................................17
Chapter 4 Experiment Results............................29
4.1 Stroop Task in Language and Color.............................. 29
4.2 Stroop Task For Chinese Processing........................... 33
Chapter 5 Discussion.................................................45
5.1 Stroop Task in Language and Color........................................... 45
5.2 Stroop Task For Chinese Processing..................................... 46

Chapter 5 Discussion

5.1 Stroop Task in Language and Color
Word IC reflects the inhibition performance of the word interference under theChinese condition, so the change of the response time is the change in participants’suppressing word interference. From the table 2, at t2 the p=0.088<0.1 which meansthat in the second experiment, the performance between two groups are significantlydifferent. Compared to figure 1, it is can be seen that from t1 to t2 the two groups are indifferent development trends. Why did two groups have different development trends?The author studied their training session and found that from t1 to t2 these two groupshave different professional course orientations. From t1 to t2, for translation group, thecourses focus on accuracy while interpreting group’s courses focus on fluency andbecause of the Word IC aim to test participants’ ability to suppress meaninginterference (namely accuracy) so it can be illustrated the different trends of twogroups. From t1 to t2, the development trend of interpreting group is totally opposite.Because the courses for interpreting group during this period begin to focus more onimproving students’ ability to ensure accuracy. So for interpreting group, it means thatwhen they respond to word meaning there will be a part for them to consume to ensureaccuracy. That is why interpreting group’ response time become longer from t2 to t3than last period.
..........................

Chapter 6 Conclusion

6.1 Major Findings

reference(omitted)