| Chinese brain twister is intentionally made in a puzzling manner as a language game, and propounded to be guessed or answered, especially for the purpose of amusement. It wins its popularity because of the laughter and feeling of"that's it"brought out at the instant when the unexpected answer is understood. However, inadequate further efforts have been made to ponder over what's special for Chinese brain twisters, and what kind of internal cognitive mechanism underlying the language game can make the answer be so weird but reasonable. According to the definition and researches made by Fillmore on Frame semantics, and the interpretation of Frame-shifting by Coulson and it's representation in on-line jokes, the present study find that Chinese brain twister is a kind phenomenon of frame-shifting, which reflects the operation of a semantic reanalysis process that reorganizes existing information into a new frame. On the basis of these two theoretical foundations, the present study completes a systematic classification of the Chinese brain twister collected.In addition, the term"insight"has been used by psychologists to name the process by which a problem solver suddenly moves from a state of not knowing how to solve a problem to a state of knowing how to solve it. Accordingly, Chinese brain twister can also elicit insight, and after continued concentration on the problem, the breaking of the previous assumption brings the people an"Aha"experience. Therefore, the present thesis aims to unveil the cognitive and neural mechanism underlying the integration of Chinese brain twisters, by recording ERP data of a continuous on-line measure of language processing, with a resort to researches on insight/Aha effect and discussion of frame-shifting in Chinese brain twisters.Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are one measure of ongoing brain activity currently used by psycholinguists, psychologists, and other neuroscientists. The ERP is a waveform with a series of positive and negative peaks (often called components) that can be correlated with various types of cognitive activity. ERPs are multi-dimensional by virtue of their polarity, amplitude, latency, scalp distribution and etc. After comparison of the ERP data of three different reaction types, the study finds three ERP components relating to the internal cognitive mechanism of frame-shifting. They are respectively P2, which may indicate the early sensory, perceptual and semantic processing and also can be also an obvious index for the initiation of frame-shifting which is attributed to the initiation of cognitive cognition; N380, which reflects the cognitive conflicts during the frame-shifting from the initial one to the subsequent one, and the greater the conflict is, the greater the mean amplitude of difference wave is; LPC, which is mainly related to successful frame-shifting by combining the contextual information and background knowledge updated in the working memory and integrating relations between the disjunctor and connector, and it might also reflect a confirmation of the participant's understanding of the brain twisters, which is based on knowledge stored in long-term memory and the on-line updating of working memory. Otherwise, by comparing the behavioral performance and ERP data of different categories and types of Chinese brain twisters, the result shows that brain twisters of frame-shifting within frames are easier to be processed and integrated than those of frame-shifting across frames and the frame shifting from idiom frame to literal meaning frame is the most difficult one to be processed in sentential integration.
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