An ERPs Approach To The Supervenience Derivation Of Chinese Irony

As a ubiquitous form of language, frequently used in everyday discourse, irony has been extensively discussed from different perspectives. Ever since the 1970s, irony finally has become a focus approached by psychologists, linguists, and philosophers, with different approaches to irony being proposed. Most of the Chinese scholars studied irony from rhetorical, pragmatic and cognitive perspectives, and recently some researchers studied on the mechanism of irony comprehension in a psychological way. Although scholars abroad made a lot of empirical studies on irony, the study of Chinese irony is few. The aim of this study is to explore the mental processing of Chinese irony by using ERPs which is more accurate than reaction time studies, providing the electrophysiological evidence of supervenience derivation in irony comprehension.Scholars both at home and abroad did a lot of researches on irony, but none of them has provided the electrophysiological evidence of supervenience derivation in irony comprehension. In order to carry out an in-depth exploration of supervenience derivation, this paper tends to use ERPs technique to investigate the following question:Is there any electrophysiological evidence to support the hypothesis that supervenience derivation is psychologically real in the comprehension of irony utterances?The present study is a one-factor within-subjects design with three levels (types of discourse:ironic statements, literal statements and nonsensical statements). It uses both RT and ERPs as indexes. In the experiment, subjects are asked to first fully comprehend a discourse combined by a context sentence and a critical sentence, then complete the lexical decision task, and at last determine whether the meaning of an assertive sentence is consistent with the foregoing discourse. According to the critical words in the critical sentences, the experiment is conducted under three conditions: ironic statements, literal statements and nonsensical statements. Meanwhile, record the RT and ERPs when subjects are performing the lexical decision task. The experiment is programmed by using the software E-prime2.0 and the ERPs results are collected, recorded and off-line analyzed by the software Neuroscan4.5. Afterwards, the outcomes are analyzed by statistic software SPSS19.0.The results of the current study demonstrate that:(1) According to the behavioral data, the reaction time of the probe words in the nonsensical statements is significantly longer than that in the ironic statements and literal statements. The behavioral data demonstrate the successful derivation of supervenience from the critical words which promotes the judgment of probe words. The accuracy rates of all the three conditions are high and show no significant difference.(2) ERPs data reveal that in the time window between 250 and 450 ms, the mean amplitude of N400 elicited by the probe words in the nonsensical statements is noticeably larger than that in the ironic statements [F(1,23)=17.306, p=0.000<0.05] and literal statements [F(1,23)=11.760, p=0.002<0.05]. The difference lies in the frontal and central region. The mean amplitude of N400 shows no significant difference between ironic statements and literal statements, [F(1,23)=0.553, p=0.465>0.05]. In the time window between 450 and 1000 ms. the mean amplitude of negativities elicited by the probe words in the nonsensical statements is noticeably larger than that in the ironic statements [F(1,23)= 10.068, p=0.004<0.05] and literal statements [F(1,23)=17.714, p=0.000<0.05]. The mean amplitude of N400 shows no significant difference between ironic statements and literal statements, [F(1,23)=1.969, p=0.174>0.05]. The difference lies in the frontal and central region.The above results show that:(1) The behavioral data demonstrate the successful derivation of supervenience from the critical words which promotes the judgment of probe words. However, it is this process of derivation that leads to the longer time of judging probe words in ironic statements. This result testifies the existence of the psychological reality of supervenience derivation in irony comprehension.(2) The ERPs data reveal that the facilitation effect of ironic statements and literal statements is larger than that of nonsensical statements. Due to the high familiarity of these ironic sentences, when comprehending ironic statements, subjects derived the same meaning with literal statements. At the same time, the processing differences between ironic statements, literal statements and nonsensical statements exist at frontal and central region. The results of present study support the Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model proposed by Liao Qiaoyun (2015), and prove that supervenience derivation is psychologically real in irony comprehension.In summary, both behavioral and ERPs data testify the psychological reality of supervenience derivation for irony comprehension, and the supervenience derivation contributes to the comprehension of irony and other figurative language.