| With the development of cognitive linguistics,scholars at home and abroad begin to study personification from cognitive perspective.In recent years,many scholars explore the construal mechanism of Chinese personification with conceptual metaphor theory and achieve certain academic accomplishments.However,in terms of empirical study,there is no relevant research at home and abroad,let alone applying ERPs to study the construal mechanism of personification.Liao Qiaoyun(2015)put forward a new semantic rhetoric construal framework,Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model(ADRIM),in which Chinese personification is understood.So the present study uses ERPs to verify the feasibility of this framework to see whether the psychological reality of the extraction of possible features exists during the processing of Chinese personification?The experiment is completed in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuro-science and Foreign Language Learning in SISU.The study adopts a one-factor within-subjects design with three levels(types of critical sentences: rhetorical sentence/personification,literal sentence,and nonsensical sentence)and uses RT and EEG as indexes.Materials made by familiar Chinese personification are presented randomly.In the experiment,at first,contexts and critical sentences are presented and the subjects are required to read each of them and to judge whether the following probe word is acceptable and the meaning of the final assertive sentence is accordance with the prior context.When subjects are making judgments,the computer records their behavioral data and EEG data by the software Neuroscan4.5 and Synaps 2.At last,these data will be collected to make a off-line analysis by statistic software SPSS16.0The results of the experiment demonstrate that:The reaction time of the judgment of probe words is 1050.48 ms in rhetorical sentence(possible feature extractable sentence),989.59 ms in literal sentence and1090.13 ms in nonsensical sentence(possible feature non-extractable sentence).It iseasy to see that the reaction time in literal sentence is the shortest,while the reaction time in nonsensical sentence is the longest.The difference in accuracy of judgment under three sentence conditions is not significant.The results are consistent with our expectation.The reason is that when understanding the rhetorical sentences,the subjects need to spend more time extracting the possible features shared by the tenor and vehicle than in literal sentences.The behavioral data verifies the psychological reality of possible feature extraction in the comprehension of Chinese personification.The ERPs data shows that the amplitude of N400 elicited by probe words in nonsensical sentence is much higher than in literal sentence and rhetorical sentence,especially in frontal and central regions.There is no significant difference between rhetorical sentence and literal sentence.The results are partially inconsistent with our expectation.In nonsensical sentence,the extraction of possible feature is blocked,which influences the understanding of probe words,so the amplitude of N400 is the highest.In rhetorical sentence,due to semantic violation,the subjects need to search for more psychological resources to understand personification,so the amplitude of N400 in rhetorical sentence is higher than in literal sentence.However,the materials used in the experiment are too familiar,so there is no significant difference between rhetorical sentence and literal sentence.Therefore,the ERPs data is also in favor of Liao Qiaoyun's theoretical hypothesis.Besides,the mean amplitude of LPC elicited by probe words in literal sentence is the highest.The result is not consistent with the previous related studies.The possible explanation is that the amplitude of LPC is inversely proportional to the degree of difficulty in tasks.All in all,both behavioral data and ERPs data verify the psychological reality of the extraction of possible feature in the comprehension of Chinese personification. |
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