Suppression Mechanisms Of Topic And Vehicle During L2 Metaphor Comprehension

The study of metaphor has intrigued the interest of many researchers for a long time.Inthe early time,metaphor is only considered as a figure of speech.And later on,Lakoff and Johnson,in cognitive perspective,propose the conceptual metaphor theory and it indicates that the nature of a metaphor is systematically conceptual.The metaphor is the cognitive tool for people to comprehend the abstract things.Although the research of the metaphor has been lasted for a long time,the metaphor comprehension processing is still under debate nowadays.Until nowadays,three major theories have been raised to explain the metaphor comprehension processing: the contrast theory,the attribute categorization theory and the structure mapping theory.Many researchers conduct experiments to prove that suppression mechanisms exist in the metaphor comprehension,and the justification of three theories is also explored.The metaphor comprehension processing in the L2(second language)of bilinguals has aroused the interest of many researchers.However,the metaphor processing of bilinguals is also very controversial.The researches of the L2 metaphor comprehension processing through suppression mechanism are few.The current study not only explores the suppression mechanisms of L2 metaphor comprehension,but also explores the difference of the suppression mechanisms in the topic and vehicle.The priming effects of the topic and vehicle are different in three theories of metaphor comprehension: contrast theory claims that the priming effects of topic are more than vehicle during the metaphor interpretation.Attribute categorization theory proposes that the priming effects of vehicle are more than topic.The structure mapping theory indicates that the priming effects of topic and vehicle are not different.Therefore,the current study investigates the suppression mechanisms of the L2 topic and vehicle to test whether the priming effects of L2 topic and vehicle are different or not.The objective of the current study is to explore which metaphor comprehension theory is more persuasive for explaining the L2 metaphor comprehension processing,and then provides help and reference for the study of the L2 learning.The current design is based on the paradigm of Gernsbacher,and four improvements are made to this experiment.Firstly,the present experiment adopts the interval of 100 ms rather than the interval of 450 ms in the Gernsbacher's experiment.Secondly,the independent probe technique is adopted in current experiment,and the subjects of the target sentences are replaced with new ones.Thirdly,the baselines are changed into neutral ones rather than the literal sentences in the Gernsbacher's experiment.At last,the current study explores thesuppression mechanisms of both topic and vehicle,and the Gernsbacher's experiment only explores the vehicle.The current study includes a behavior experiment which adopts the priming paradigm,and the coordinate bilinguals whose first language are Chinese and second language are English are chosen as subjects.During the experiment,the participants are given a priming sentence to judge its sensibility.Then after the interval of 100 ms,a target sentence appears.The participant needs to judge the sensibility of the target sentence and the reaction time is collected to test the suppression and enhancement effects.The instrument of the experiment is E-prime which collects the experimental results and all the data are analyzed by Excel and SPSS.The results of current experiment suggest that when the metaphor priming sentences precede the metaphor relevant properties(MRP),the subjects react to the MRP more quickly than that preceded by neutral baselines in the control condition.On the other hand,when the metaphor priming sentences precede the metaphor irrelevant properties(MIP),the subjects react to the MIP slower than that preceded by neutral baselines in the control condition.Moreover,the positive and negative effects of suppression mechanisms on topic and vehicle properties are not different significantly.Therefore,the experiment results indicate that the suppression mechanisms exist in the L2 metaphor comprehension processing,and the suppression mechanisms of topic and vehicle during the L2 metaphor comprehension aren't different significantly.The present results are consistent with the hypothesis of the structure mapping theory.Thus,the structure mapping theory is more persuasive to explain the L2 metaphor comprehension processing.