A ERP Study Of Chinese Metaphor Process Mechanism

Metaphor, as the usually linguistic phenomenon, attracted many people to study it. Many study of metaphor comprehension focus on whether metaphor process different form literal, how the role of hemisphere in metaphor process. With the science developed and some electrophysiology tools to use, especially the cognitive science developed, people regard the metaphor as the tools to cognitive the world rather than a linguistic phenomenon. With the sight of cognitive to metaphor, bring a new life for metaphor research.There is seldom laboratory research among Chinese language and with the subject which mother language is Chinese, so we choose the students which mother language is Chinese, and with the Chinese metaphor sentence, to our experiment. We review some class hypothesis and behavior study of metaphor comprehension, and with some electrophysiology study--ERP, expatiate the mechanism of metaphor process by the time course and hemisphere role. Also we introduce some newly hypothesis and research trend of metaphor process.With the laboratory of ERP, we use the Neuro-scan 4.3 work station, in the screen of computer the subjects could see the randomly sentence comprise of metaphor, literal and error sentence. With the work station we record the behavior and potential data.From the research we found that the understanding of metaphor is deviating from literal language to some extent. There were no different between the process at the beginning of understanding, for example the N1 potential, but the stage that which N400 dictating that the mean process , the were different between the metaphor and literal language. We research found that didn't agree with the prior theory that the process of metaphor is not simply the right or left hemispheres process ,but the both parts interactive with the metaphor, just the left active more.Metaphor, as the normal linguistic phenomenon of human daily life, the research had expand form the linguistic to many subjects, but with the limitation of tools and deficiency of studying , there is a long way to climbing.