A Comparative Study Of The Semantic Embodied Effects In The Processing Of Chinese And English Tool-use Hand Action Verbs

Tool-use hand action verb(HAV)is one of the most important categories in verb.Scholars at home and abroad have conducted some researches on processing tool-use HAV of healthy people and motor disease patients from the perspective of embodied cognition,and found that healthy people could activate motor cortex when processing tool-use HAV,while motor disease patients do not have similar reactions.Although scholars at home and abroad have been involved in researches of the processing of tooluse HAV,it was rare to discuss the differences in semantic embodied effect of processing Chinese and English tool-use HAV from the perspective of second language acquisition.Therefore,this study intended to find whether there were differences processing Chinese and English tool-use HAV by EFL learners.The research questions are as follows:(1)Is there any semantic embodied effect in the processing of Chinese tool-use HAV by Chinese EFL learners?(2)Is there any semantic embodied effect in the processing of English tool-use HAV by Chinese EFL learners?(3)Are there any differences in the processing of Chinese and English tool-use HAV by Chinese EFL learners?In order to answer research questions above,two experiments were conducted.Each one of experiment was a 2(types of priming words: tool word and the related object word)×3(types of target words: the tool-use hand action verb,the non-tool-use hand action verb and the foot action verb)within subjects design.Thirty English postgraduates from SISU were selected as participants.Each experiment consisted of 132 trials,including six kinds of collocations.Specifically,the tool-use HAV and the tool word,the tool-use HAV and the object word,the non-tool-use HAV and the tool word,the non-tool-use HAV and the object word,the foot action verb and the tool word,the foot action verb and the object word.The experimental task was lexical semantic judgment task.The E-Prime recorded the reaction time and accuracy rate of target word.The experiments were conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU.The computers are equipped with the software of E-Prime 2.0.The experimental data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0 with the paired sample t test.The experimental results are listed as follows:The reaction time of experiment one showed that: there was a significant difference between two kinds of Chinese tool-use HAV(t=-6.513,p=.000<0.05).There was no significant difference between two kinds of Chinese non-tool-use HAV(t=1.752,p-.081>0.05).The differences between two kinds of Chinese tool-use HAV result from the different collocation of words and the existence of semantic embodied effect of Chinese tool-use hand action verbs.There was no significant difference between two kinds of Chinese HAV.Hence,the existence of semantic embodied effect of Chinese tool-use hand action verbs was proved by Chinese EFL learners.The reaction time of experiment two showed that: there was no significant difference between two kinds of English tool-use HAV(t=-3.000,p=.766>0.05),there was no significant difference between two kinds of English HAV(t=.865,p=.394>0.05).Hence,the existence of semantic embodied effect of English tool-use HAV was not proved by Chinese EFL learners.Above results demonstrated that,there was semantic embodied effect when processing Chinese tool-use HAV by EFL learners.However,there was no semantic embodied effect when processing English tool-use hand action verbs by EFL learners,which might reveal the fact that the way of English acquisition was different from the mother tongue acquisition by Chinese EFL learners.The acquisition of English depended more on the storage of symbol system information,and the acquisition of Chinese depended more on the sensory motor system information.