A Comparative Study Of The Construal Mechanism Of Conventional Idiom Metaphor And Novel Idiom Metaphor:based On ERPs

Chinese idioms,as a kind of non-literal language with Chinese characteristics,has drawn the attention of a number of scholars from home and abroad.Familiarity is one of the most important factors exerting influence on the non-literal language,many models from abroad have posed some related hypothesis.Graded Salience Hypothesis(GSH),the most widely acknowledged one,holds that salient meaning,namely metaphorical meaning,has been stored in human psychological lexicon for conventional idioms with high familiarity,thus the metaphorical meaning is highly activated without resorting to literal meaning.While for novel idioms with low familiarity,the metaphorical meaning cannot be directly activated,thus the accessibility of metaphorical meaning is later than that of the literal meaning.The present study takes a comprehensive research on the development history and tendency of Chinese idioms,on the basis of which,the author designs an event-related potentials(ERPs)experiment with Chinese idioms as the research object,discussing the differences of the processing of conventional idiom metaphor and novel idiom metaphor.The experiment observes and records the ERPs data(mainly N400)from 24 subjects in SISU majoring in English,aiming at exploring the processing mechanism of conventional idiom metaphor and novel idiom metaphor.In the experiment,subjects are asked to first fully comprehend a discourse combined by a paragraph and a Chinese idiom,then complete the lexical decision task.ERPs data is recorded in the experiment as subjects are performing the lexical decision task.The experiment is programmed by using the software E-prime1.1 and the ERPs results are collected,recorded and off-line analyzed by the software Neuroscan4.5.Afterwards,the outcomes are analyzed by statistic software SPSS19.0.The results of the current study demonstrate that: The difference of N400 amplitude evoked by conditions is evident in the processing.Novel idiom metaphor differs remarkably from conventional ones in the frontal region and central region.Conventional idiom metaphor and literal ones exhibit differences in frontal region in which nine electrodes are included.Therefore,the results show that the processing of novel idiom metaphor is remarkably different from that of conventional ones,the former is in need of more cognitive resources and attention.In summary,ERPs data is consistent with our prediction and offers further electrophysiological evidence for GSH.