Cognitive Process Of Chinese Graphic Logogriph And Semantic Logogriph And TheirRelated Prototype Elicitation Effects

Chinese riddle can date back to ancient times, and later the development of lantern riddle contributed to the prevalence and popularity of this language phenomenon. Chinese riddle can be regarded as the representation of human wisdom for its variety and complexity. Chinese logogriph, a type of Chinese riddle whose answers are Chinese characters, with its special twists and turns, is interesting to solve and enjoys unique artistic and cultural values. Therefore, it is meaningful to explore the cognitive mechanism of Chinese logogriph processing.Guessing Chinese logogriph requires logogriph solvers to break the mental constraints of conventional meaning and to find out the right logogriphic meaning, hence Chinese logogriph can be analyzed by insight theories and non-literal language models. Domestic and overseas scholars have put forward three main insight theories: representation change theory, progress monitoring theory and prototype heuristic theory. The representation change theory considers insight as a representation change process; the progress monitoring theory emphasizes that individuals have an inner criterion to monitor the process of solving insight problems, and that there are facilitation effects of criterion failure to insight problem solving; the prototype heuristic theory suggests that the activation of prototype and the use of heuristic information could enhance the occurrence of insight. Three models are widely adopted to explain non-literal language processing, which include the standard pragmatic model, the direct access model, and the graded salience model. The first two models focus the significance of context to the process of non-literal meaning, while the last model regards salience as a more important element than context. Even though there are abundant theories associated with Chinese logogriph and researches selecting Chinese logogriphs as their experimental materials, only few empirical studies set out to take Chinese logogriph as a unique language phenomenon and analyze its cognitive mechanism.This study compared the cognitive mechanisms and the associated prototype elicitation effects of Chinese graphic logogriph and semantic logogriph, and employed a set of four testing papers to examine the accuracy of logogriph solving. 102 Chinese native speakers participated in this research, and were divided into 4 groups (prototypical logogriph elicitation, non-prototypical logogriph elicitation, conventional meaning elicitation and non-elicitation) in accordance with 4 different elicitation conditions. The research selected 48 Chinese logogriphs as experimental materials, including 24 graphic logogriphs and 24 semantic logogriphs, and adopted the learning-testing paradigm.The experimental results indicate that graphic logogriphs enjoyed higher accuracy than semantic logogriphs under the 4 elicitation conditions, which implies that the cognitive process of semantic logogriphs might be more complex than graphic logogriphs.Moreover, the overall accuracy of the prototypical logogriph elicitation group was significantly higher than the other three groups, suggesting that prototype elicitation might facilitate the solving of both graphic logogriphs and semantic logogriphs.