| Embodied cognition insists that high-level cognitive processes involvesimulation or re-enactment of low-level perceptual, motor and emotion experience.Many theories are proposed from the view of embodied cognition, among whichsimulation semantics thinks that language processing is a process of mentalsimulation of linguistic content run by language users.Most previous studies have found that language processing is based on themental simulation of the sensory-motor experience by exploring the processing ofliteral sentences from the view of simulation semantics. According to conceptualmetaphor theory, image schema can construct abstract concepts and providesensory-motor grounding for them. However, there are a few studies applying theresponse time experiment to explore the role of image schema in the processing ofmetaphor.To fill the gaps, three response time experiments are conducted and a2(stimulustype: verbal stimulus and orientational stimulus)×2(sentence type: the literalsentence describing the vertical event and the up-down image schema-basedmetaphorical sentence) research design is made. The verbal stimulus is presented inthe form of word pairs. The referents of the two words in each verbal stimulus arecanonical objects of a system, such as head-foot. The orientational stimulus (asshown in appendix3) is formed by two dynamic “++++”. These two kinds of stimulican elicit up-down image schema. The180experimental sentences included in thethree experiments are same, which include60literal sentences describing the verticalevents (LSs),60up-down image schema-based metaphorical sentences (MSs) and60filler sentences (FSs). The verbs and the verb phrases describing the vertical motionin the LSs and MSs are same. Three research questions are proposed in this study:(1) Does the verbally-elicited up-down schema affect the processing of the LSsand the MSs?(2) Does the orientationally-elicited up-down schema mediate the processing of the LSs and the MSs?(3) If so, do the verbally-elicited up-downschema and the orientationally-elicited up-down schema have the same effect on theprocessing of the LSs and the MSs?To explore the above questions,30postgraduates majoring in English fromSISU take part in this study. In experiment one, there is no stimulus before theexperimental sentences. In experiment two, a verbal stimulus is presented before theexperimental sentences. In experiment three, there is an orientational stimulus priorto the experimental sentences. All of the experiments are completed in the Key Labof Cognitive Neuroscience&Foreign Language Learning in SISU. The behavioraldata of reaction time and accuracy rate are calculated by the statistic software SPSS.The statistic methods are applied to analyze the data. The analysis of statisticsdemonstrates the following findings:(1) The processing of LSs and MSs are both faster elicited by verbal stimulusthan without stimulus, which shows that verbally-elicited up-down schema canenhance the processing of LSs and MSs.(2) The processing of LSs and MSs are bothfaster elicited by orientational stimulus than without stimulus, which shows thatorientationally-elicited up-down schema can enhance the processing of LSs and MSs.(3) There is no significant difference between the processing of LSs primed by theverbal stimulus and the orientational stimulus, which demonstrates that the up-downschema primed by the verbal stimulus and the up-down schema primed by theorientational stimulus have the same effect on the processing of LSs. The processingof MSs primed by the verbal stimulus is faster than the processing of MSs primed bythe orientational stimulus, which states that the up-down schema primed by theverbal stimulus has more effect on the processing of MSs than the up-down schemaprimed by the orientational stimulus. However, these two kinds of elicited up-downschemas have the same positive effect on the processing of LSs.Generally speaking, the current study has shown that up-down schema facilitatesthe mental simulation of the LSs and MSs. Therefore, the processing time of the sentences gets shortened. |
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