A Behavioral Experimental Study Of Metonymic And Metaphorical Understanding In Chinese Verb-Object Collocations

Metonymy and metaphor research on Chinese verb-object collocation has formed a certain theoretical basis,but in addition to introspective research,empirical evidence may be needed to prove or falsify it.Therefore,after investigating the model theory and experimental paradigms in the study of metonymic and metaphorical experiments and controlling the influencing factors,this paper employed 30 participants and the prime paradigm that K.Ledoux et al.(2007)and Qingrong Chen et al.(2013)have ever employed,to study the metonymic and metaphorical understanding of the Chinese verb-object collocation.And at the same time,this experiment employed the visual vivid image Questionnaire-2(VVIQ-2)to test the participant,in order to figure out whether the image ability is correlated with verb understanding or not.The results may show that there is a quite difference between metonymic and metaphorical understanding of Chinese verb-object collocation,and that understanding of Chinese metaphorical verb-object collocation is faster than metonymic one,which to some extent supports the parallel hypothesis and suggests that the study of the semantic cognitive chain in Chinese figurative expression understanding is worth reconsidering.At the same time,this study did not find that there is a significant difference in behavioral data between high VVIQ-scorers and low VVIQ-scorers under the VVIQ-2 division.Visual imagery may reflect deeper level of the human brain.