Neural Substrates Of Chinese And English Metaphor Processing

In this study we use Chinese metaphor processing ERP experiment to see if Chinese metaphor processing has its unique lateralization, to compare our results with findings home and abroad, to study semantics representations in Chinese and English bilingual brains. Recently, ERP is preferably used in brain function researches with its advantage of high temporal resolution. N400 components are widely recognized as the key brain waves showing the processing and integration of semantics. This study will focus on the analysis of the N400 components for all the experiments. However, ERP also has its defects of low spatial resolution, so we attempt to use a source localization algorithm named sLORETA to further process the N400 components so as to formalize a 3-D brain topograph of brain activation areas.This study addressing Chinese metaphor processing consists of three separate ERP experiments including:Experimentâ… :Neural correlates of Chinese metaphoric idioms and literal idioms; Experimentâ…¡:Neural correlates of Chinese metaphor in a composite paradigm; Experimentâ…¢:Neural correlates of Chinese&English Bilingual Brain metaphor processing. The three experiments respectively use literal expressions, conventional metaphoric expressions, novel metaphoric expressions and unrelated or anomalous semantic expressions as the linguistic stimuli so as to explore the dynamic processing features of Chinese metaphor. The first two experiments focus on the brain mechanism of Chinese metaphor processing in literate Chinese brains, while the third experiment focuses on the Chinese and English bilingual brain mechanism of metaphor processing both from Chinese, their mother tongue and English, their second language or foreign language.The analyses of the N400 components of the three experiments provide statistical evidence to show that the neural correlates of Chinese metaphor processing is generally consistent with the findings made by Western metaphor studies, i.e. the characteristic of holistic representation, though lateral asymmetry. However, our study also finds that Chinese metaphor processing activates unique brain areas in that parietal lobe area is significantly involved in Chinese metaphor comprehension. Besides, the experiment of bilingual brains indicates that the second language metaphor needs to be channeled through the frist language or mother tongue semantic integration system despite the fact that the second language has its unique neural correlates. Thus we show doubts on the hypothesis of common representation. To sum up, our study extends the relevant studies home and abroad, which provides some empirical evidence to develop the existing metaphor theories, and possibly enriches the development of artificial intelligence and machine translation.