In October 2019, the National Office of Philosophy and Social Science published the annual list of projects. With “The Chunking Processing of Chinese Learners' Multi-Word Phrases”, Dr. Yanjun Wei won the National Social Science Fund Excellent Doctoral Thesis Publishing Project, the first project type established by the National Social Science Fund to mainly support outstanding doctoral thesis completed in the field of philosophy and social science in the past three years.
Dr. Wei Yanjun's thesis is based on two frontier areas, “multi-word phrase” of linguistics and “chunking” of cognitive psychology. Finding the interdisciplinary intersection of the two, he reinterpreted its processing mechanism as a long-standing basic theoretical issue under the second-language context. In terms of research methods, the horizontal design and the vertical tracking design are used together to verify each other, and the problem of “chunking processing” is answered from different levels. In the theoretical field of view, the obscurities in definition of “lexical chunk” have been broken, the concept of "chunking" is brought in for the reinterpretation of the meaning of holistic processing. The article considers chunking as a dynamic psycholinguistic unit as well as a basic processing unit for oral expression. The result of this research helps the academia to re-recognize the status of multi-word phrases in the language system.
