The Neural Processing Mechanism Of Conventional And Novel Metaphors Comprehension In Chinese Simple Sentences

Metaphor has always been an important part of linguistic research. Since the Aristotle period, metaphor has been kept on developing with the continuous study of the linguists. The metaphor research boom of the 20th century brought the related study into the wider and deeper degree. With the coming out of the new research questions, as well as to provide more convincing and scientific evidence in language study, linguists tried to make use of more research methods. With the development of new instruments such as fMRI and ERP, they became the new experimental methods for neural science and cognitive science. Until 1980 Kutas and Hillyard used ERPs experiment and found component N400 play an important role in language processing, linguists started to put ERPs experiment into linguistics researches. During this procedure, many linguistic researches turned to scientific ones and got numerous findings. At this time, the Chinese scholars began to take part in the research waves and used Chinese as the research language.This thesis focuses on the neural processing mechanism of conventional and novel metaphors comprehension in Chinese simple sentences, and operates the empirical experiment with ERPs. There are two-round pre-tests of questionnaires for the students of Chongqing University and the aim is to determine the rationality and familiarity of the sentence materials. Then the author uses software Stim 2 to design the experiment, collects the ERPs data of each subject, and uses NeuroScan to record the EEG, as well as to do the offline analysis, and finally uses SPSS 17.0 to get the statistics.In summary, this research got the following results: on the whole, the more familiar the sentence is, the more easily the sentence to be understood, and the less time we need to react. First, the processing of metaphor needs more effort than that of literal meanings. Second, novel metaphor need more effort and complex selection or judgment than conventional metaphors, meanwhile, inside of novel metaphors, the novel unconventional metaphor needs more time to be understood than novel conventional metaphor. Third, different sentence and syntax structures lead to different language understanding. Forth, compared with majors, the gender factor influences the processing of language more obviously, and females have the advantage in language understanding both in time and effort. Fifth, in metaphor processing, both the left and right hemispheres play a role, with the right side showing a little larger effort. Therefore, we believe that the understanding and comprehension of metaphor is the result of cooperation by both left and right hemispheres.