An ERPs Approach To Sex Differences In The Construal Mechanism Of Chinese Euphemism

Euphemism has been widely used in people's everyday discourses as a common form of language.It's a long time since quite a number of anthropologists,historians and linguists found that euphemism appears as a sex variation of language for sex is directly related to language,which infers from a fact that men and women obviously differ from each other in language use,especially in words and the style of speeches.However,most Chinese scholars studied the sex differences of euphemism from the perspectives in rhetoric,semantics,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics,and in recent years some researchers studied on the sex differences by analyzing the mechanism of euphemism comprehension in a psychological approach.The purpose of this study is to explore the differences of sex on extracting mental processing of Chinese euphemism by using ERPs which has much more accuracy than reaction time studies,providing the electrophysiological evidence of supervenience derivation in euphemism comprehension.Scholars who are from both at home and abroad have not provided the electrophysiological evidence of supervenience derivation in sex differences when comprehending euphemism.In order to discuss the phenomenon of sex differences in an deeper exploration of supervenience derivation,this paper tends to investigate the following question by ERPs technique: Is there any electrophysiological evidence to prove the hypothesis that supervenience derivation is psychologically real in the comprehension of euphemism utterances?The present study is a one-factor within-participants design with three levels(types of discourse: euphemistic sentences,literal sentences and anonymous sentences),participants 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,theexperiment is conducted under three conditions: euphemistic sentences,literal sentences and anonymous sentences.Meanwhile,the RT and ERPs are recorded when participants 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 SPSS16.0.The results of the current study demonstrate that:(1)Behavioral data shows that the reaction time of the probe words about females in the anonymous sentences is clearly longer than that in the euphemistic sentences and literal sentences which produce the shortest reaction time.As for males,the reaction time of the probe words in the anonymous sentences also use the longest reaction time,but the euphemistic sentences produce the shortest reaction time.The behavioral data demonstrates the successful derivation of supervenience from the critical words which promotes the judgment of probe words.The accuracy rates of all the three conditions of both females and males are high and show no significant difference,but totally females' accuracy rates are lower than males.(2)In 0-160 ms time window,the difference in understanding euphemistic sentences is crystal clear with the p value equals to p=.000.Yet,in comprehending the other two types of sentences of literal sentences and anonymous sentences,no difference can be concluded because the p value for the former is p=.147,for the latter,p=.177.While in 160-290 ms time window,we see a crystal distinction for both males and females in understanding all three types of sentences.In 290-750 ms time window we cannot see any difference for both males and females in understanding all three types of sentences.The above results show that:Behavioral data verifies that male participants and female participants successfully extract supervenience derivation in probe words.But the difference is not clear.This is due to the fact that all the experimental materials are familiar to theparticipants.ERPs data indicate N100 can indicate that females are more easier to realize euphemism.For P200,both males and females are eager to judge the sentences,and have their own way of understanding the three type of sentences.As for N400,the three types of sentences between sexes shows no difference because both sexes have the same comprehension of the sentences.