Embodied Cognitive Perspective On The Concreteness Effect In Chinese EFL Learners' Processing Of English Affective Nouns: Evidence From ERPs

The cognitive theory of embodiment holds that people's advanced cognitive activities such as reasoning, processing and comprehension of language is on the basis of their sensory-perceptual, sensorimotor and emotional experiences. Words, as the basic unit of language, can not only express meaning, but can also express people's particular emotional attitude and experience. At present, the empirical researches on affective words mostly concrete on the emotional effect in lexical processing. However, there are few empirical studies which focus on the comprehension mechanism of affective nouns among different levels of concreteness by combining concreteness and emotionality in lexical processing. Moreover, the current dichotomy between abstract and concrete nouns overlooks the dimension of half-abstracts. Based on the previous studies, the present study adopts an ERPs approach to studying the processing mechanism of affective nouns among different levels of concreteness from the perspective of the embodied cognitive theory for the purpose of making a further investigation on the semantic processing mechanism of affective nouns among different levels of concreteness. The following two questions are addressed:(1) Does emotionality of nouns exert influence on Chinese EFL learners' processing of English affective nouns?(2) Does concreteness of nouns influence Chinese EFL learners' processing of English affective nouns?This study adopts a 3(concreteness of nouns: abstract, half-abstract and concrete) × 3(emotional valence of nouns: positive, neutral and negative) within-subject design. Sixteen postgraduates majoring in English language and literature from SISU participated the experiment. In the experiment, the abstract positive nouns, half-abstract positive nouns, concrete positive nouns, abstract neutral nouns, half-abstract neutral nouns, concrete neutral nouns, abstract negative nouns, half-abstract negative nouns and concrete negative nouns are selected as target words. Subjects are required to make judgment on the emotional valence of the target words, and then Chinese EFL learners' processing differences of English affective nouns at different levels of concreteness will be investigated by comparing and analyzing the differences of behavioral data and electrophysiological data.The experimental procedure is programmed by the software E-Prime1.1, and the behavioral data and electrophysiological data are collected and recorded by the software Neuroscan4.5 and Synaps2. After that, the EEG data are processed by off-line analysis and the statistical analysis of the outcomes are processed by the software SPSS19.0. The whole ERPs experiment is carried out in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU. The results are summarized as follows:(1) According to the behavioral data, under the positive condition, the processing of half-abstract nouns is significantly faster than that of concrete nouns(p=.025<.05). However, there is no significant difference between the processing of abstract and half-abstract nouns or between abstract and concrete nouns(ps>.05). Under neutral and negative conditions, there is no significant difference among abstract, half-abstract and concrete nouns(ps>.05). These findings suggest that the activation of corresponding affective experience of subjects and their high proficiency second language contribute a lot to their processing of abstract nouns, thus resulting in the disappearance of the priority effect of concrete nouns under positive, neutral and negative conditions.(2) As far as electrophysiological data concerned, no statistically significant difference of concreteness is reveled over the N100 and P200 components, while it is obvious in the peak amplitude of N400 component. An obvious peak amplitude of N400 component is elicited by the Chinese EFL learners' processing of abstract, half-abstract and concrete nouns both in neutral and negative conditions, in which there is the largest N400 peak amplitude elicited by concrete nouns, and a larger N400 peak amplitude elicited by half-abstract nouns than that of abstract nouns. Under positive conditions, there is no significant difference among the processing of abstract, half-abstract and concrete nouns(ps>.05). These findings suggest that the concreteness of words has great influence on the semantic processing of neutral and negative nouns in the late stage, and it takes more cognitive effort for subjects to judge the emotional valence of concrete nouns than that of abstract nouns owing to the proportion of emotional information they contain.To sum up, the variable emotionality and the variable concreteness of nouns do exert great influence on advanced Chinese EFL learners' processing of English affective nouns. Moreover, the corresponding activation of emotional experience of subjects and their high proficiency of second language may promote their processing of English abstract nouns, thus leading to the disappearance of the priority effect of concrete nouns.