A Cognitive Study on Politeness Intention Processing and Its Association with Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication
-
Rong Yan
Rong Y
an is a senior associate professor of psychology at the Academy of Future Education, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. His primary research areas are psycholinguistics and language acquisition.Tengfei F
eng is an MA student at the School of English Language, Literature & Culture, Beijing International Studies University. Her research efforts have focused on TESOL.Samad Z
are (the corresponding author) is an assistant professor at the Learning Institute for Future Excellence, Academy of Future Education, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. His primary research areas are language acquisition, intercultural communication, cross-cultural studies, and TESOL.
Abstract
Although a large number of studies have focused on various aspects of politeness, very little is known about how politeness intention is activated cognitively during verbal communication. The present study aims to explore the cognitive mechanism of politeness intention processing, and how it is related to pragmatic failure during cross-cultural communication. Using 30 Chinese EFL university students who were instructed to finish a probe word judgment task with 96 virtual scenarios, the results indicate that within both mono- and cross-cultural contexts, the response time in the experimental scenarios was significantly slower than that of the filler scenarios. This suggests that politeness intention was activated while understanding the surface meaning of the conversation; however, the EFL learners could not completely avoid the negative transfer of their native politeness conventions when they were comprehending the conversational intention of the target language. Furthermore, no significant differences in response time were found between the groups with high and low English pragmatic competence, illustrating that transferring the pragmatic rules and principles into cross-cultural communication skills was more cognitively demanding. Overall, this study adds to the literature on politeness research and provides some implications for foreign language pragmatic instructions.
About the authors
Rong Yan is a senior associate professor of psychology at the Academy of Future Education, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. His primary research areas are psycholinguistics and language acquisition.
Tengfei Feng is an MA student at the School of English Language, Literature & Culture, Beijing International Studies University. Her research efforts have focused on TESOL.
Samad Zare (the corresponding author) is an assistant professor at the Learning Institute for Future Excellence, Academy of Future Education, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. His primary research areas are language acquisition, intercultural communication, cross-cultural studies, and TESOL.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Xingyue Xiang, Ningzi Sun, and Chundi Xu, three dedicated MA students from the Department of Educational Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Their diligent efforts during the preparation of this manuscript significantly enriched its quality.
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© 2024 BFSU, FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Second Language Acquisition
- A Comparative Study of the L2 Pragmatic Competence of University Students in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland: The Contributions of Sociocultural Context and Linguistic Proficiency
- Effects of Collocational Congruency, Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of English Adjective-Noun Collocations
- Embodied Meaning in Comprehending Abstract Chinese Counterfactuals
- Text Difficulty, Working Memory Capacity and Mind Wandering During Chinese EFL Learners’ Reading
- Testing, Evaluation and Assessment
- Scoring and Consequential Validity Evidence of Computer- and Paper-Based Writing Tests in Times of Change
- Cross-Cultural Communication
- A Cognitive Study on Politeness Intention Processing and Its Association with Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication
- English-Medium Instruction
- Lecturers’ Efforts in Building Rapport in the English-Medium Instruction (EMI) Context: Focus on the Use of Communication Strategies
- Book Review
- Review of Accessing Academic Discourse: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory
- Systematizing Teacher Development: A Review of Foreign Language Teacher Learning
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Second Language Acquisition
- A Comparative Study of the L2 Pragmatic Competence of University Students in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland: The Contributions of Sociocultural Context and Linguistic Proficiency
- Effects of Collocational Congruency, Frequency and L2 Proficiency on the Processing of English Adjective-Noun Collocations
- Embodied Meaning in Comprehending Abstract Chinese Counterfactuals
- Text Difficulty, Working Memory Capacity and Mind Wandering During Chinese EFL Learners’ Reading
- Testing, Evaluation and Assessment
- Scoring and Consequential Validity Evidence of Computer- and Paper-Based Writing Tests in Times of Change
- Cross-Cultural Communication
- A Cognitive Study on Politeness Intention Processing and Its Association with Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication
- English-Medium Instruction
- Lecturers’ Efforts in Building Rapport in the English-Medium Instruction (EMI) Context: Focus on the Use of Communication Strategies
- Book Review
- Review of Accessing Academic Discourse: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory
- Systematizing Teacher Development: A Review of Foreign Language Teacher Learning
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
