Metaphor Representation Of English-Chinese Bilingual Under Different Second Language Proficiency:an ERP Study

In recent years, the scholars home and abroad do lots of researches about how the bilinguals’first and second language represent in their brain. However, they haven’t got a unitary conclusion yet. There are very few researchers research about the relationship between metaphor representation and the second language proficiency level.In this paper, we use Event-related Potentials to study the metaphor representation of English-Chinese bilinguals under different second language proficiency by doing a semantic-type-judging task. Group1’s CET-6is higher than600and group2’s CET-6is lower than430. The sentence structure is all "A is B". The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the neural mechanism of Chinese bilinguals when processing the Chinese metaphor and English metaphor, and to test whether this situation will be changed under different second language proficiency. We will get a better understanding of how Chinese and English metaphor stored in Chinese bilinguals’brain and whether this second language proficiency can be an effect to this relation. We will by the way know whether the Chinese neural pathway will be adopted by the bilinguals when comprehending English metaphor and also, how the second language proficiency will affect this relation. We use ERP which has high temporal resolution and non-injury nature to testify our experimental purpose. We will get the ERP data from both groups. We will offline analysis our data and use the language semantic sensitive component of N400to answer our question from activation electrodes distribution perspective, a hemispheric activation perspective and so on.The behavior result and ERP result show us that the processing of Chinese metaphor is a whole brain processing and this will not be changed under different second language proficiency. The processing of English metaphor is also a whole brain processing and this will not be changed under different second language proficiency. There exist much more degree activation of the whole brain especially the language key brain area, when English metaphor processing in lower English proficiency group than in the higher English proficiency group, and the lower English group will spend much more mental resource because of this higher activation. Both groups adopt the Chinese neural pathway to help them process the English metaphor and the lower English proficiency group adopted more. Moreover, we also find that when comes to the processing of metaphor in bilinguals, the higher second language proficiency is, and the more degree of common representation is. In a word, the paper is an empirical study and fulfillment to the semantic representation researches home and abroad. It also possibly helps to get a better understanding of how bilinguals’brain work when processing metaphor.