An ERPs Approach On Construal Mechanism Of English Irony

As a common rhetorical device and expression,irony uses the opposite words of real intention to express negation,satire and mockery,and to express the strong emotion of the speaker.Many scholars have studied its pragmatic effects,such as humor,condemnation and so on.Some scholars concentrate on the construal mechanism of irony from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics and have made some achievements.With the development of science and technology,ERPs(Event-Related Potentials)technology has provided a new empirical research method for the study of language cognitive process.Liao Qiaoyun(2015)puts forward the ADRIM(Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model)and holds that there is extraction of possible feature in the construal of rhetoric discourses,which provides another perspective for the study of English irony.Scholars at home and abroad have studied the irony in many fields,but there are relatively few studies on whether the extraction of possible features exists in the processing of English irony.In this paper,ERPs technology is applied to testify the ADRIM proposed by Liao Qiaoyun(2015).The research question is: Is there any electrophysiological evidence to support the psychological reality of possible feature derivation in the construal of English irony?This experiment is conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU,Chongqing.A total of 18 postgraduate students from SISU participated in the experiment.This experiment takes reaction time and electroencephalogram as the indexes.The present study is a one-factor within-subjects design with three levels(types of discourse: ironic sentences,literal sentences and nonsensical sentences).The materials are all English and presented randomly.The first task of the subjects is to read and understand the context sentences and critical sentences in a fixed period of time.Then the probe words are presented in the screen.Subjects need to judge whether the probe words are real words or pseudo words and press the corresponding key(F-real word;J-pseudo word).The experimental materials are programmed by E-prime 2.0 software.When the computer records the response time of the subjects,the EEG data is collected and recorded by Neruoscan 4.5 and Synaps 2.Then the EEG data is analyzed off-line,and at last the data is further analyzed by statistic software SPSS19.0.The results of the study are presented as follows:(1)The response time of literal sentences and ironic sentences is basically the same,711.55 ms and 712.57 ms respectively,while the response time of nonsensical sentences is the longest,732 ms.The accuracy rate of all the three conditions is high.There is no obvious difference on the response time for ironic sentences and literal sentences,which indicates subjects are familiar with these ironic sentences.Subjects can quickly abstract the possible feature without any difficulty and make the judgments toward probe words.(2)The amplitudes of P200,N400 and LPC present significant difference under the conditions of ironic sentences,literal sentences and nonsensical sentences.The amplitude of N400 elicited by nonsensical sentences is significantly larger than ironic sentences and literal sentence.Under the condition of ironic sentences and literal sentences,the amplitude of N400 presents difference in the left frontal region [t(14)=-6.110,p=.000<.05],middle frontal region[t(14)=-2.733,p=.017<.05];and the amplitudes of P200 and LPC also present obvious difference in the frontal region.The amplitude of N400 elicited by ironic sentences and nonsensical sentences presents difference in the left frontal region [t(14)=2.820,p=.014<.05],right frontal region [t(14)=3.628,p=.003<.05],middle frontal region [t(14)=4.309,p=.001<.05],middle central region [t(14)=4.912,p=.000<.05],left central region [t(14)=6.527,p=.000<.05],right central region [t(18)=9.834,p=.000<.05].Under the condition of literal sentences and nonsensical sentences,the amplitude of N400 presents difference in the frontal region and central region;LPC presents difference in the frontal region,central region and parietal region.Based on the above results,conclusions are summarized as follows:(1)The subjects can successfully extract the possible features in the processing of English irony,which promotes the judgment of probe words.(2)The difference of processing ironic sentences and literal sentences presents in the frontal region,which indicates that the processing of English irony is mainly in the frontal region.The result also confirms the important role of the frontal region in language processing.(3)The construal of English irony needs more effort in the frontal region.The results of this study support ADRIM proposed by Liao Qiaoyun(2015),and provide ERPs evidence for the construal mechanism of English irony.