| One linguistic form containing more than one sense is common in every language. Many scholars and experts at home and abroad devote themselves to researching how to divide and describe those senses reasonably from cognitive perspective. Sweester(1990) makes a research on the polysemy of five perception verbs(see, hear, smell, taste and feel) from the perspective of Mind-as-Body Metaphor theory. He insists that the different senses of polysemy are caused by the interaction between body and external environment. However, he does not give the standard about how polysemous words divide the senses. As for the sense demarcation of polysemy, prepositions play a major role in the related achievements, and other parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives attract little attention. What is more, they try to prove that through theoretical explanation with few empirical evidences. Therefore, based on the previous studies and limitations, the author tries to explore the differences in mental representation of literal sense and metaphorical sense of English body action polysemous verbs using ERPs technique so as to provide empirical evidence to the sense demarcation of English body action polysemous verbs in the dictionary compilation. So the research question is as follows: Are there any differences in the Chinese EFL learners' mental representation of the literal and metaphorical senses of the English body action verbs?This experiment is a within-subject design with two levels(literal sense, LS for short and metaphorical sense, MS for short), and sentences with semantic anomaly are used as fillers. 17 postgraduates in Sichuan International Studies University who majoring in English take part in the experiment and the materials are presented in the middle of computer at random. They are required to judge whether the target verb can be filled in the blank from meaning and grammar. The recorded behavioral and ERPs data are the basis to answer the research question. The program is finished by E-prime 2.0, and ERPs data is acquired and edited off-line by Neuroscan4.5. The whole experiment is carried out in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU. The statistical software SPSS 19.0 is applied to analyze the behavioral and ERPs data which are shown in the following parts.After the statistic analysis, the results are presented from two aspects:(1) The behavioral data. There is no significance in response time(RT for short) between the literal sense(MeanRT=1670.66) and metaphorical sense(MeanRT=1608.19) of English body action polysemous verbs(t=2.083, p=0.137). However, there are significant differences in RT between filler(MeanRT=1162.94) and LS(t LS-f=2.491, pLS-f=0.026), between MS and filler(tMS-f=2.826, pMS-f=0.013). Besides that, the difference in accuracy(ACC for short)among LS, MS and fillers are not prominent((tLS-MS=0.709, pLS-MS=0.49; tLS-f=-1.546, pLS-f=0.144; tMS-f=-1.688, pMS-f=0.114). This result is not consistent with the anticipated result, and it seems that there is no difference in the Chinese EFL learners' mental representation of the literal and metaphorical senses of the English body action verbs. However, owing to the deficiency of response time, so the data can not reflect the participants' mental representation. The following two reasons perhaps can used to explain the behavioral data. First, the target verbs are often-used words and the representation of literal sense in the brain is as consolidated as the representation of metaphorical sense. Therefore, there is no significant difference in the response time. Second, all participants are postgraduates in SISU who can get the target verbs' meaning easily, so there is no significant difference in ACC. Therefore, in this experiment, maybe both RT and ACC are not the sensitive indexes to reflect the differences in the Chinese EFL learners' mental representation of the literal and metaphorical senses of the English body action verbs.(2) The ERPs data. P200, N400 and P600 are three key ERPs components in this study evoked by target words.(A) P200: the discrepancies among literal sense, metaphorical sense and filler in the peak amplitude, that is to say, the main effect in LS, MS and filler is significant(F=3.34, p=0.004). Also, the interaction effect between LS, MS and filler and hemisphere is big(F=2.69, p=0.000). In the latency, the main effect in LS, MS and filler is significant(F=3.34, p=0.012), so is the mean amplitude(F=3.34, p=0.026). Those data show that there are significant differences among LS, MS and filler in the early processing stage of selective attention.(B) N400: the main effect among LS, MS and filler in mean amplitude is significant(F=3.34, p=0.007). The amplitude of filler is larger than that of MS which is lager than LS. It shows that there are obvious differences among LS, MS and filler in the stage of deep semantic processing.(C) P600: the main effect in LS, MS and filler is significant(F=3.34, p=0.001); also, the interaction effect between target verbs and region especially the frontal brain regions is big(F=2.69, p=0.004); then the the interaction effect between target verbs and hemisphere is remarkable(F=2.69, p=0.000). In the time window from 550 ms to 1000 ms, the main effect in LS, MS and filler in mean amplitude is significant(F=3.34, p=0.003). The data suggest that there exist noticeable differences in the late stage of semantic integration or the sentence meaning integration. In a nutshell, in light of ERPs data above, we can know that there exist significant differences in the early stage of selective attention processing, in the stage of deep semantic processing and in the late stage of sentence meaning integration respectively. As a result, there are significant differences in mental representation between LS and MS.In summary, the results of this study indicate that there are differences in the Chinese EFL learners' mental representation of the literal and metaphorical senses of the English body action verbs, which provides psychological evidence for the sense demarcation of English body action verbs in the dictionary compilation. |
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