A Study Of The Effect Of Implied Physical Effort On Processing Chinese Body-related Verbs

Verbs carry the most important semantic information in sentences,and are the most critical part of daily discourse.Factors such as aging or disease attacking can affect the efficiency of language processing,especially in verb processing.Existing foreign neuroimaging studies have shown that nouns reflecting different weights have different impact on brain activation.However,at present,most researches on verb effort were limited to Indo-European languages,and the effect of processing Chinese verbs has not been fully developed.In this study,RT experimental technique was used to collect behavioral data to explore the influence of different implied physical effort(IPE)on Chinese body-related verb processing.Research questions are:(1)Does IPE affect Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs?(2)Does IPE arousal affect Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs?(3)Do IPE and arousal of IPE interactively affect Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs?.There were two experiments in present study,and both adopted a within-subject experiment design: 3(Verb Types: IPE verbs,non-IPE verbs and control verbs)× 3(Levels of IPE Arousal: high IPE arousal,middle IPE arousal,and low IPE arousal).The experiments were programmed with E-Prime 2.0 software,recording the reaction time and accuracy of the subject’ judgments on the target words.Experiments were completed at the “Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience & Foreign Language Learning” at Sichuan International Studies University.SPSS 17.0 was adopted to analyze experiment data,and the results were as follows:(1)Significant main effect of IPE was found,F(2,70)=18.588,p=.000<.001,which showed that under priming conditions of IPE verbs,non-IPE verbs and control verbs,reaction time(RT)of participants in processing nouns at three levels of IPE arousal was significantly different.In processing nouns of the same IPE arousal,RT under priming condition of IPE verbs was longer than that of non-IPE verbs and control verbs,which indicated that IPE verb had the most influential impact on processing nouns at three levels of IPE arousal.It could be interpreted that IPE had aneffect on Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs.(2)Significant main effect of IPE arousal was found with F(2,70)=8.627,p=.000<.001,which showed that under priming conditions of high,middle,and low IPE arousal,RTs of participants in processing three types of Chinese body-related verb were significantly different.It could be implied that IPE arousal had an effect on Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs.In addition,effect of high IPE arousal worked most sensitively on IPE verbs.There was no statistic difference between the effect of middle IPE arousal and low IPE arousal on non-IPE verbs and control verbs.(3)Significant interactive effect between IPE and IPE arousal was found,F(4,140)=19.095,p=.000<.001,which showed that IPE and PIE arousal affected Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs interactively.A further simple effect analysis showed that under priming conditions of different levels of IPE arousal,each RT was significantly different in processing the same type of verbs with ps<.01,and RT of IPE verbs decreased with IPE arousal levels reduction.It indicated that IPE arousal had an impact on Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs.To sum up,IPE and IPE arousal affected Chinese native speakers’ processing of Chinese body-related verbs independently and interactively.