ACQUISITION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSATIVE VERBS OF LANGUAGE LEARNERS: AN ANALYSIS BASED ON COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Abstract

The psychological causative verbs are a sub-category of causative verbs that describes the psychological activities of learners. These verbs are widely used in English and thus critical to English language learning. Based on cognitive psychology, this paper explores the variation in the cognitive level of English learners at different learning stages from the perspective of semantic organization and representation of psychological causative verbs. First, twenty typical English causative verbs were selected. Then, a questionnaire survey was carried out on the classification of psychological causative verbs. Moreover, the author conducted an interlingual priming effect experiment on psychological causative verbs between Chinese and English. On this basis, the acquisition of psychological causative verbs was evaluated in three stages, namely, high school, college and graduate school. The results show that the information processing of psychological causative verbs conforms to the development law of Bloom’s cognitive domain model: with the growing number of years of English language learning, the cognitive behavior of causative verbs moves onto a higher stage; interlingual priming effect exists in the cognitive process of psychological causative verbs. The research results provide a valuable guide for English language learners in all stages.