The Priming Effects Of Conceptual Metaphor On Bilingual's Understanding Of Metaphorical Expressions

Metaphor study has been a hot issue since ancient time which developed from rhetorical perspective to cognitive perspective. In the early time, metaphor was studied as a figure of speech. Later on, metaphor has been studied as a way of thinking. From cognitive perspective, Lakoff and Johnson put forward the conceptual metaphor theory which claims that the nature of the metaphor is fundamentally and systematically conceptual. It is a powerful cognitive tool for people to conceptualize the abstract things and used as the neural network to help speakers to master the metaphorical expressions, and this opinion was proved by the native subjects. However, how the bilinguals process metaphors is still unsolved. Therefore in the present study, we combine the study of conceptual metaphor with the study of the bilingualism, especially for bilingual's· mental representation. In recent five decades, the researches of bilingual's mental representation have been a hot topic discussed home and abroad. Researchers adopt different kinds of experiments to see the mental representation. They addressed the topic revolving these basic questions:Is the bilingual's mental representation the same as the monolingual's? And how the two systems of the languages are stored in bilingual's mind? According to these questions, the researchers come up with two controversial theoretical hypotheses. They are the separate hypothesis and the shared hypothesis. The former holds that the semantic system stored separately in different systems of the bilingual's mind, and the latter holds that the semantic system presented in a common system. And the following debates of mental representation are still unsolved because of those two conflicting opinions. Following with the studies, some new theories came into being, such as the word association model, concept mediation model and the revised hierarchical model(RHM).In the experiment, we use' inter-language and intra-language priming effect to test the bilingual's mental representation when comprehending the metaphorical expressions of their second language. This study consists of two experiments: one is the English target experiment, and the other is the Chinese target experiment. In the experiments the participants are shown a conceptual metaphor such as Chinese conceptual metaphor, English conceptual metaphor or zero priming sentence which means no priming. Then a metaphorical linguistic expression in the second language appears. The subject's task is to judge if they understand the sentences. If they do, press the "J" key, and if not, press "F" key. The results show that, the reaction time of the sentences which have the primes are shorter than those of zero primes. And this can verify that, the conceptual metaphor can facilitate the understanding of the metaphorical expressions of their second language. This is in accordance with the conceptual metaphor theory and verify that the bilingual's mental representation fits the shared hypothesis. Furthermore, the bilingual's mental representation of the conceptual metaphor can be supported by the RHM.