The Neuropsychological Mechanism Of Chinese Pun Comprehension

This study investigates the temporal dynamics of Chinese pun comprehension and the neural underpinnings supporting this process.Through a series of three experiments,it has examined how the lexical property of the pun word(the critical ambiguous word)in a pun influences the process of dual-meaning access,how the context interacts with the pun word to create humorous effects and how this dynamic comprehension process is supported by the neural networks in the brain.Experiment 1 examined the spoken comprehension of Chinese puns utilizing the printed-word visual world paradigm.The results showed that the participants were initially more likely to look at the printed-word which was semantically related to the salient meaning of the spoken pun word.This finding can be taken as evidence that the two meanings of a pun word are not accessed simultaneously but sequentially.Experiment 2 investigated the comprehension of Chinese homophone puns using the eye-tracking technique with a more traditional reading paradigm.According to the funniness rating scores,the semantic relatedness between the critical context word and the less salient homophone has worked as a significant predictor of the funniness rating towards the homophone puns.Experiment 3 assessed the comprehension of both Chinese homophone and homograph puns adopting the event-related potential technique.According to the results,both types of puns elicited larger late positive complex relative to their corresponding control sentences.sLORETA estimates from both types of puns jointly suggest that the superior frontal gyrus was actively involved at the integration stage,indicating the crucial role of this region for successful pun comprehension.Taking together the current findings,this dissertation has put forward a neuropsychological model for pun comprehension.