The Neural Mechanism By Which Vitality Affects Metaphor Processing

In metaphoric expressions,the inanimate objects are specified as persons(and sometimes vice versa),establishing thereby animacy-related thematic role violations.Animacy violation in metaphor produces a novel,vivid and breaking conventional expression,which are completely contrary to the common and reasonable pragmatic principles in non-figurative language.What role the animacy plays in metaphor processing?The manner in which animacy could potentially impact the time course of key processes in metaphor is difficult to establish based on the preceding information.So far,previous studies regarding the influence of animacy on language processing focused on non-figurative language(i.e.,literal sentence).There are rather differences between non-figurative languages and figurative languages on the pragmatic principles and expressive manners,which also seems to suggest that animacy may play different roles in the two types of language expression.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the role of animacy in metaphor processing by empirical studies for a deeper understanding of the essential differences between metaphor and literal language,as well as the cognitive processing mechanism of metaphor language.EEG provide a high-precision technology on temporal resolution for studying language processing(Kazmerski,Blasko,&Dessalegn,2003),and are very suitable for exploring linguistic comprehension and generation as they unfold in time.In present study,innovative materials related to animacy metaphor were constructed.Original materials were collected and edited from poetry and literature.Each stimuli was judged on the 5-point Likert Scale and the Cloze Probability and selected by those pretests.Finally,an experimental material package containing 1,137 metaphors and their literal meaning counterparts(sentences or phrases)was constructed,and each stimuli had five dimensions of parameters.and the EEG technology was used to investigate the impact of animacy on metaphor processing by comparing the behavioral and EEG activities indicators when the participants performed metaphor comprehension and metaphor generation with different animacy degrees:whether animacy plays an important role in metaphor comprehension,facilitating or impeding?Whether animacy influences metaphor generation,and what is the difference between brain oscilation patterns elicited by animate and inanimate metaphor generation of the initial stage of the idea generation and the final stage of the idea elaboration?In study 1,using a metaphorically/literally plausible judgment task,we recorded ERPs elicited by the target words when the participants read metaphor or literal language to examine the animacy affects the temporal dynamics processing of predicate metaphor(Exp.1)and adjective metaphor(Exp.2)comprehension by two experiments.Based on experiment 1,a significant difference in the P600 amplitudes between inanimate and animate metaphorical conditions,and the metaphors with inanimate actor(animacy violation)elicited an attenuated P600 as compared with the animate counterparts.In experiment 2,a graded LPC amplitudes were found between animate and inanimate metaphors,an attenuated LPC effects were found in animate metaphor conditions containing intensive conflict(animacy violation),compared to their inanimate counterparts.These results indicated that:(1)The animate-related relationship rather than the animacy per se affects the processing of metaphor,and the conflict strength(animacy violation vs.no animacy violation)modulates the time course of metaphor processing.(2)The function role of animacy in metaphor processing is different from the literal language,and animacy violation facilitate metaphorical comprehension.In study 2,using a lexical generation paradigm of adjective metaphors,we examine that the role of animacy in producing metaphor or literal language reflected by the indicators of behaviour strategy(Exp.3)and the pattern of oscillatory brain activities(Exp.4).Experiment 3 showed that animate metaphors using cross-animacy strategy show more better quality form four dimensions than inanimate ones.In experiment 4,on the right frontal(F8).compared with animate metaphors,inanimate metaphors elicited greater theta band power,indicating an increased processing cost in lexical-semantic retrieval operations within 0-300 ms of initial idea generation.These result indicated that:(1)Behaviourally,animacy-violation strategies tend to be used in high-animacy metaphorical generation tasks and can facilitate the quality of metaphor products;The source domains are familiar and characteristic by an animate objects(human motivations,characteristics,and activities),are more easily associated with the inanimate source domain,which is originally remote in the semantic category.This strategy of metaphor generation by cross-animacy is benefits for creative processing of metaphor and the quality of metaphorical products.(2)The modulated effect of animacy on the metaphorical idea generation of the brain oscillations pattern is reflected in the part of right frontal;lexical-semantic retrieval operations that same as literal task were used when participants performed the inanimate metaphor generation,which may be one of possible reason why the quality is inferior than animate counterparts.In elaboration stage,the animacy plays a major regulating role for language generation.According to the above results,our conclusions are as follows:First,the animacy affects the understanding and production of metaphor.From the perspective of metaphor comprehension,the animacy violation facilitates the understanding of metaphor,which is different from the results of non-figurative language,indicating the essential difference between metaphor and literal language.Then,from the aspects of metaphor generation,the strategy of animacy violation is conducive to the metaphor expression and is benefits for the quality of metaphorical products.Second,the Directionality Principle plays an important role in both the comprehension and generation of metaphor.Metaphor processing with animacy violation more often relies on experience of humanity denoting animate source domains to describe inanimate target domains.This processing involves mapping from more familiar and prototypical source domain to unfamiliar and non-typical target domain,and is compatible with Directionality Principle,which is benefits for metaphor comprehension and the generation.