A Comparative Study of Students' Perception of Chinese Medicine Vocabulary in Different Majors

A total of 400 common Chinese medicine vocabularies were selected, and students of tradition Chinese medicine (TCM) and non-TCM related majors were asked to evaluate the semantic properties of those vocabularies, so as to explore their semantic properties and the relationship between them. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between two kinds of semantic properties in Chinese medicine vocabularies. In addition, the regression analysis showed that familiarity and imageability were the main factors influencing the comprehensibility of those vocabularies. Familiarity was the principal factor influencing the metaphorical judgments of non-TCM students. However, it is not the major factor influencing the judgments of TCM-related students. Besides, imageability played a dominant part in the metaphorical judgments of TCM corpus.