A Cognitive Study on Politeness Intention Processing and Its Association with Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication

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.