Chen Ling, Ye Hengming
This study examines the familiarity of university students in Guangdong Province with the vocabulary associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, using a survey questionnaire for data gathering. The research intends to uncover differences in understanding of pandemic-related terminology across gender, academic majors, and grade levels. Implementing sociolinguistic and speech communication analysis, it is revealed that terms like ‘novel coronavirus pneumonia COVID-19’ attract more attention from male students. Medical students, from an academic discipline viewpoint, showed greater interest in terminology including ‘epidemic name’, ‘organization’, ‘place name’, ‘pathological symptoms’, ‘equipment name’, ‘medical term’, ‘professional term’, ‘other terms’, and ‘occupational group’. Familiarity with vocabulary related to ‘pathological symptoms’ differed significantly by grade level, with freshmen showing less understanding than sophomores and juniors. The paper investigates the reasons for the preferential attention of male students to ‘proper nouns’, and why medical students paid more attention to professional language associated with the new coronavirus epidemic given their social background and identities. The cognitive viewpoint is used to explain freshmen’s less extensive knowledge of terms like ‘pathological symptoms’ when compared to sophomores and juniors. The ‘knowledge gap’ hypothesis is utilized to explain the lack of difference in attention to pandemic-related vocabulary across genders, grade levels, and disciplines. Finally, the study adopts a communication perspective to discuss how variations among recipients’ impact communication effectiveness.