Neural Mechanism Of Metaphor Comprehension:a Comparative Study Between Chinese And English

As a figure of speech,metaphor is widely used in different fields such as rhetoric,literature and everyday life.Over the past two decades,there has been an ever-growing interest in metaphor processing.Since the 1980 s,Lakoff and Johnson have been studying metaphor from the perspective of cognition and believed that metaphor is a way in which people perceive the world.This understanding has marked a milestone in the history of metaphor study.Many scholars have done follow-up studies on the basis of this perspective and a series of construal models have been put forward.The latest one went to Liao Qiaoyun(2015)who proposed a comprehensive construal of metaphor which is named ADRIM.Pan Xiang(2016)further verified this model and proved its psychological reality.However,whether there are any similarities and differences of neural mechanisms of metaphor comprehension between Chinese and English is still a question to be answered.The present study has tried to explore this with the help of ERPs.The experiment is conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU,Chongqing.The present study uses both RT and ERPs as indexes and consists of two experiments one with Chinese materials and the other with English materials covering three levels(types of discourse: Chinese metaphorical sentences,Chinese literal sentences,Chinese anonymous sentences;English metaphorical sentences,English literal sentences and English anonymous sentences).At first,subjects are presented with contexts and critical sentences.They are required to read and understand these materials carefully and thoroughly.Next,subjects are presented with probe words,and are asked to judge the realness of the probe words and press the corresponding buttons on the keyboard.The experiment is programmed by using the software E-prime 2.0 and the ERPs results are collected,recorded and off-line analyzed by the software Neuroscan 4.5.Afterwards,the outcomes are analyzed by statistic software SPSS19.0.The research obtains the following results:(1)According to the behavioral data in the experiment of Chinese materials,the RT of probe word in metaphorical condition is the shortest,followed by literal and anonymous one.In the experiment of English materials,the reaction time of probe words in literal condition is the shortest,followed by metaphorical and anonymous one.(2)According to the data of ERPs,in the experiment of Chinese materials,the differences of N400 amplitude between literal condition and anonymous condition are significant in the frontal region [t(19)=-3.353,p=.003<.05],the differences between metaphorical condition and anonymous condition are significant in the parietal region[t(19)=2.936,p=.007<.05].And in the experiment of English materials,the amplitude of N400 witnesses differences between metaphorical sentences and anonymous sentences in the left frontal region [t(19)=3.374,p=.003<.05],and in the right frontal region [t(19)=3.087,p=.006<.05].And the differences of amplitude of N400 between literal sentences and anonymous sentences are represented in the left frontal region[t(19)=5.209,p=.000<.05],and in the right frontal region [t(19)=3.918,p=.001<.05].There is no obvious difference of the amplitude of N400 elicited by metaphorical sentences and literal sentences of both Chinese and English materials.In the experiment of Chinese materials,the differences of LPC between literal condition and metaphorical condition are significant in the frontal region [t(19)=-1.794,p=.086<.05].In the experiment of English materials,the amplitude of LPC witnesses differences between metaphorical sentences and literal sentences in the middle frontal region[t(19)=-8.963,p=.000<.05],the left parietal region [t(19)=-2.954,p=.008<.05],and the right parietal region [t(19)=-8.963,p=.000<.05].The amplitude of LPC elicited by literal sentences is larger than that elicited by metaphorical sentences of both Chinese and English materials.On the basis of the above results,the conclusions are summarized as follows:(1)Compared with the processing of Chinese metaphorical sentences,the processing of English metaphorical sentences is more difficult.(2)As for the hemisphere,it is found that there is a right hemisphere advantage of conventional Chinese metaphor.Nevertheless,when it comes to the comprehension of English metaphor,the significant role of the whole brain involves.It is worth pointing out that both Chineseand English experiments show significant activation in the frontal region,especially the left and the middle frontal region under conditions of metaphorical statements and literal statements in the process of language comprehension.This study confirms that the framework proposed by Liao Qiaoyun(2015)is applicable to the interpretation of both Chinese and English metaphor.