An E-Prime Study On The Semantic Embodiment In Chinese-English Bilinguals' Processing Of Fictive Motion Sentences

Fictive motion is a common and special linguistic phenomenon in human language.Starting from Talmy's researches on fictive motion in the late 1970 s,cognitive studies of fictive motion has been an important research topic in the field of cognitive linguistics.Generally speaking,most of the researches on fictive motion at home and abroad focus on theoretical research and cross-language comparative studies.Scholars abroad and at home have done a few psychological experiments to study fictive motion.At present,few scholars have conducted empirical researches on the differences between fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences from the perspective of embodied cognition theory.Therefore,the present study intends to conduct an E-Prime study on the processing of fictive motion sentences from the perspective of embodied cognition theory in order to examine the existence of semantic embodiedment in the processing of fictive motion sentences by Chinese-English bilinguals.The specific research questions are as follows: 1)Is there a difference in the processing of fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences by Chinese-English bilinguals under the non-priming condition? 2)Is there a difference in the processing of fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences by Chinese-English bilinguals under the picture-priming condition? 3)Is there a difference in the processing of fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences by Chinese-English bilinguals under the sentence-priming condition?The present study includes three experiments.In order to ensure the validity of the experiments,30 English major postgraduate students from Sichuan International Studies University were selected as subjects.Experiment One is a single-factor within-subject design with four levels(fictive motion sentences,non-fictive motion sentences,fictive motion sentence fillers and non-fictive motion sentence fillers).This is an English sentence comprehension experiment.In Experiment One,participants are required to read the sentence as quickly as possible.When they completely comprehend the sentence,they can press any key to continue the experiment.Meanwhile,the reaction time of this experiment is recorded for the final data analysis.Experiment Two is a single-factor within-subject design with four levels(fictive motion sentences,non-fictive motion sentences,fictive motion sentence fillers and non-fictive motion sentence fillers).This is a picture priming sentence experiment.The participants in Experiment Two are the same with those of Experiment One.Participants are required to read the sentence as quickly as possible.When they completely comprehend the sentence,they can press any key to continue the experiment.At the same time,the reaction time of this experiment is also recorded.Experiment Three is a 2(sentence types: fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences)×2(picture types: congruent pictures and incongruent pictures)two-factor within-subject design.This is a sentence priming picture experiment.The participants in Experiment Three are the same with those of Experiment One.Participants need to perform a picture decision task,in which they decide whether the picture is congruent with the preceding sentence.At the same time,during their judging performance,the reaction time as well as the accuracy rate of the experiment is recorded.The three experiments were programmed by E-prime 2.0 and then were conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning at Sichuan International Studies University.The experimental data was ultimately put into the SPSS software for data analysis.In order to obtain the data analysis,the statistical methods of one-way ANOVA and t-test are adopted.The results the three experiment are as follows:1)In Experiment One,the results demonstrate that the reaction time of fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences processed by Chinese-English bilinguals under the non-priming condition has a significant difference(F=53.36,p=.000).It can be said that Chinese-English bilinguals process fictive motion and non-fictive motion differently and there exists semantic embodiedment in the processing of fictive motion sentences.2)In Experiment Two,the results demonstrate that,under the picture-priming condition,a significant difference can be seen in the reaction time of fictive motion and non-fictive motion processed by Chinese-English bilinguals(F=6.801,p=.014).The results indicate that Chinese-English bilinguals process fictive motion and non-fictive motion differently under the picture-priming condition and there exists semantic embodiedment in the processing of fictive motion sentences.3)In Experiment Three,the results demonstrate that a significant difference can be seen between the reaction time of understanding congruent pictures under the prime of fictive motion sentences and that of comprehending congruent pictures under the prime of non-fictive motion sentences by Chinese-English bilinguals: F=4.974,p=.034,which indicates that Chinese-English bilinguals process fictive motion and non-fictive motion differently and there exists semantic embodiedment in the processing of fictive motion sentences.The results of the three experiments show that Chinese-English bilinguals have differences in the processing of fictive motion sentences and non-fictive motion sentences,and semantic embodiedment exists in the processing of fictive motion sentences.The cognitive process of fictive motion involves mental simulation and has its experiential basis,ie,fictive motion is closely related to physical experience in the real world.