A Preliminary Study on the Implicit Structure of the Chinese Folk Concept“Dou” for College Students

By adopting the Spreading Activation Model and the word association method, a preliminary study is conducted of the representations concerning the concept dou. And the worddou was used as a stimulus and277 college students were asked to write out the words that came to mind when they heard the word dou. Then69 dou-related high frequency words/ phrases were collected as material for analysis. Another100 students were asked to give a hierarchical cluster analysis of these words. The research finds: college students tended to characterize the concept of dou from the four aspects of success/failure struggle, mimicry struggle, ability struggle and interest struggle. Anχ2 test of the testees about their gender, only- or non-on- ly child who put forth the various kinds of associational words ofdou reveals that in terms of ability struggle and interest strug- gle there exists a significant obvious gender difference.