An Eye-movement Study On The Psychological Reality Of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor At The Clause Rank

Ideational grammatical metaphor(IGM)is an important topic of linguistics,and scholars have made theoretical and empirical researches on it.In the theoretical researches,scholars improved its theoretical framework constantly by exploring its operative mechanism,tapping into its theoretical significance and cross-language impacts,and so on.Compared with the theoretical researches,the number of empirical researches was much smaller,and the empirical approaches mainly probed into the distribution of IGM in various texts and the relationship between IGM and text processing.Besides,some scholars applied the study of IGM to different aspects of teaching,such as reading,translation,writing,etc.However,these researches mostly focused on nominalization at the discourse level with various methods such as questionnaires,teaching evaluation,and so forth.But they were seldom involved in the psychological nature of IGM.Although some researchers have begun to attach an importance to IGM at the clause rank,little has been done to acquire evidence from precise experiments that could verify the psychological reality of IGM.IGM at the clause rank occurs when experience prototypically represented by one type of process or state is actually represented by another.Metaphorical clauses are products of IGM at the clause rank.Therefore,the present paper used more sophisticated eye-tracking technique and combined with the priming paradigm,aiming at investigating the psychological reality of IGM at the clause rank and verifying whether language proficiency could influence the processing of grammatical clauses.The current experiment was a 2(language proficiency: high versus low)× 2(priming condition: priming condition versus non-priming condition)mixed design.Sixty participants took part in the experiment.A mixed factorial ANOVA was conducted.It was found that priming condition witnessed a marginally significant effect on mean fixation time in Sentence AOI(area of interest).It was suggested that priming condition aroused a main effect on regression-out counts in Verb AOI.In the analyses of questionnaire,priming condition produced a main effect on the readability of grammatical clauses.The result indicated that the experimental group processed grammatical clauses more efficiently than the control group.The result showed that a main effect of language proficiency was found in mean fixation time in Sentence AOI.The high proficiency participants processed grammatical clauses more efficiently than the low proficiency participants.Taken together,IGM at the clause rank had its psychological reality with high proficiency readers processing grammatical clauses more efficiently.This study provided an empirical model for the combination of eye-tracking technique and IGM research.