The Process Of Metaphor Comprehension In Chinese And The Effect Of The Direction And Similarity

Metaphor research has aroused widely attention by the researchers in linguistics and linguistic psychology. Similarity is the basis of metaphor, and direction is an important semantic features of metaphor. Besides, metaphor will be affected by direction and similarity. With the springing up of metaphor in western regions, recent research about the application of metaphor in Chinese is gradually being focused. But the focus lies in whether we should reject literal meanings first and then deal with the metaphorical meanings. While the research in the mapping process are quite rare in metaphor comprehension. Therefore, this thesis aims at discussing the process of Chinese metaphor comprehension and effect that direction and similarity have on metaphor comprehension under the way of experiment example belongs to Wolff and Gentner(2011).Experiment 1 and 2 research the processing process of metaphor through controlling the time of the tested sentences. At the same time, we demonstrated how direction and similarity effects of metaphor comprehension. The procedure of experiment is the same, and the task is judge whether the tested sentences are understood. In Experiment 1, we researched how direction and similarity affect metaphor comprehension under the condition of deadline(1200ms/1800ms) ×direction(forward/reversed) × similarity(high/low). While Experiment 2 set the time of sentences presence as 500 ms and 1600 ms. The other conditions are the same as Experiment 1. That is to say, Experiment 2 also discusses how direction and similarity affect metaphor comprehension. The result shows that the early period and late period of metaphor comprehension are all directional processing. Besides, because of the effect of similarity, the forward metaphor is higher than reversed metaphor in comprehension. Similarity has “promotion function”, but it presents only in the later processing part. It is easier to understand high similarity metaphor than low similarity one. But we haven’t found the superior effect of high similarity in early period.In Experiment 3, we mainly discusses the early directional processing of metaphor comprehension in the angle of word pairs’ semantics association. If there exists semantic association between source domain and target domain, and it has directional priming effect, then we can offer a certain support and explanation for theearly directional processing of metaphor comprehension. And the result shows that the semantic association does exist between source domain and target domain. In addition,it has direction priming effect which means that source domain starts faster comparing with target domain. So Experiment 3 explains the conclusion of Experiment 2.In a word, Experiment 1 and 2 have proved the influence that direction and similarity make on metaphor comprehension. Also,we have figured out the processing process of metaphor comprehension. Experiment 3 tells us that whether there is association between source domain and target domain of metaphor. The results prove that metaphor comprehension is a directional processing. No matter how much time we spend, direction will have influence on metaphor comprehension. And forward metaphor can promote sentence comprehension. The later processing period of metaphor comprehension will be affected by the similarity of metaphor. And high similarity between source domain and target domain makes metaphor comprehension easier. Therefore, the research proves the metaphor comprehension is a process of directional processing, and direction as well as similarity will improve metaphor comprehension.