The Construal Of Chinese Homophonic Pun: An Empirical Study Based On ERPs

Pun,as an ancient rhetorical device,is the humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest different meanings or application of words having the same or nearly the same sound but different meanings: a play on words.It is frequently used in poetry,novels and prose due to its strong expressive force.What's more,its special rhetorical and pragmatical effect make it popular in poetry,advertisement,comedies and daily communication.In recent years,pun has received great attention from scholars and a lot of researches have been made on pun from different perspectives.Those studies can be categorized into non-empirical studies and empirical studies.Non-empirical studies include rhetorical approach,semantic approach,pragmatic approach and cognitive approach.Empirical studies include approaches of cognitive neuroscience and they are event related potentials(ERPs),functional magnet resonance imaging(fMRI)and behavioural experiments.Previous studies have made a solid foundation for the understanding of pun.However,few studies are made on homophonic pun with ERPs technique.Liao Qiaoyun put forward a semantic rhetoric construal framework,Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model(ADRIM)which can be used to explain the construal of Chinese semantic rhetoric.Therefore,the present study testify the feasibility of this framework with ERPs technique to see whether or not the abstraction of possible feature exists during the processing of Chinese homophonic pun.The present experiment is conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuro-science and Foreign Language Learning in SISU,Chongqing with 20 postgraduates of SISU participating in the experiment.A 2(probe types)× 3(controls)within subjects' paradigm is adopted.All the materials are made in Chinese and are presented randomly.Participants are required to carefully read and fully understand the sentences and judge the realness of the probe words withpressing the corresponding buttons on the keyboard.Then,they are presented with a comprehension question and participants need to judge whether the meaning of the comprehension question is in line with the foregoing discourse.The experiment is programmed by using the software E-prime 2.0.The behavioral data are recorded by the computer and the ERPs results are collected,recorded and off-line analyzed by the software Neuroscan4.5.Afterwards,the ERPs data are analyzed by statistic software SPSS19.0.The results of the present study are demonstrated as follows:The differences of N100 amplitude between original meaning related probes with related homophoic puns and that with unrelated literal sentences are marginal at right frontal region [t(17)=1.821,p=.092<0.1],left central region [t(17)=1.996,p=.067<0.1] and right central region [t(17)=1.883,p=.082<0.1],and significant at middle central region [t(17)=2.448,p=.029<.05];The significant differences of N400 amplitude between original meaning related probes with related homophonic puns and that with unrelated literal sentences are found at at left central region[t(17)=2.200,p=.048<.05],and marginal differences between them are found at middle central region [t(17)=2.000,p=.069<0.1] and right parietal region[t(17)=-1.911,p=.080<0.1];and N400 amplitude elicited by original related probes with related homophonic puns is smaller than that with unrelated literal sentences.The significant differences of N400 amplitude between literal meaning related probes with related homophonic puns and that with unrelated literal sentences are found at frontal area [t(17)=2.614,p=.021<.05] and central area [t(17)=2.627,p=.021<.05],and N400 amplitude elicited by literal meaning related probes with related homophonic puns is smaller than that with unrelated literal sentences.The mean amplitude of N400 witnesses marginal differences between original meaning related probes with related homophonic puns and literal meaning related probes with related homophonic puns at left parietal area [t(17)=-1.967,p=0.071<0.1],and N400 MA elicited by original meaning with related homophonicpuns is smaller than literal meaning related probes with related homophonic puns.On the basis of the above results,the conclusions can be illustrated as follows:(1)both meanings of homophonic pun are activated in both hemispheres,and the activation of its literal meaning(unconventional meaning)exactly demonstrates that probes really facilitate the understanding of homophonic pun,which proves the existence of the extraction of possible features during Chinese homophonic pun comprehension and further testifies the Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model(ADRIM);(2)the construal of the literal meaning(unconventional meaning)of Chinese homophonic pun needs more efforts at left parietal area.The findings of present study provide electrophysiological evidence for the psychological reality of the possible feature abstraction and testify the Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model proposed by Liao Qiaoyun(2015).