The Influence Of The Semantic Gradient Of Chinese Idiom Metaphor On Vocabulary Processing

Metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday life.As British rhetorical expert,Richards(1936,P.98)claims that “almost every three sentences in our daily conversation may have a metaphor”.At the early stage,scholars studied metaphor as the rhetorical device.Lakoff and Johnson began to study metaphor from cognitive perspective in 1980 s,and they hold that human thought and action is fundamentally metaphorical.Empirical studies at home and abroad almost focused on the construal processing of metaphor itself.However,no research involves the influence of the semantic gradients of metaphor on lexical processing.The present study aims to explore the vocabulary processing in different semantic gradients of idiom metaphor by way of ERPs.The research question is: Do different semantic gradients of Chinese idiom metaphor influence vocabulary processing?The experiment is conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU,Chongqing.It is a within-subject experimental design with four levels(idiom types: novel idiom metaphor,conventional idiom metaphor,literal idiom and irrelevant idiom)and three factors(real word related to the idioms,real word unrelated to the idioms and pseudo word).The materials are given in Chinese and are presented randomly.To begin with,a Chinese context will be presented for subject to understand.Then,a critical Chinese four-character idiom will be presented.The context and critical Chinese four-character idiom form a complete sentence.At last,a Chinese word(probe word)will be presented.Subjects are demanded to judge whether the probe words are real words or not.In the present study,E-prime 2.0 is used to program the experiment.The computer recorded the reaction time of the subjects,and the EEG data is collected,recorded and off-line analyzed by using the software Neuroscan 4.5.The collected data is further analyzed by statistic software SPSS 22.0.The results of the present study are as follows:(1)The behavioral data indicates that mean reaction time of both related and unrelated probe words is the shortest reaction time under the literal idiom,followed by the conventional idiom metaphor,and the longest reaction time of novel idiom metaphor.The reaction time of related probe words in novel idiom metaphor and that in conventional idiom metaphor shows highly significant differences [t(21)=3.582,p=.002<.01].In addition,novel idiom metaphor and literal idiom also show a very significant differences [t(21)=3.964,p=.001<.01].But the difference between reaction time of related probe words in conventional idiom metaphor and that in literal idiom is not obvious [t(21)=.531,p=.601>.05].However,the reaction time of unrelated probe words among those three conditions does not show remarkable differences.(2)The EEG data indicates that the N400 amplitude of the related probe words of novel idiom metaphor in frontal region is-6.887±3.350,that of conventional idiom metaphor is-5.066±4.288,and that of literal idiom is-3.958±4.182.And the N400 amplitude of the unrelated probe word of novel idiom metaphor in frontal region is-7.062±3.466,that of conventional idiom metaphor is-6.748±3.506,and that of literal idiom is-5.608±4.497.The N400 amplitude of the related probe words of novel idiom metaphor in central region is-5.930±3.080,that of conventional idiom metaphor is-4.278±4.288,and that of literal idiom is-3.148±4.234.And the N400 amplitude of the unrelated probe words of novel idiom metaphor in central region is-7.055±3.920,that of conventional idiom metaphor is-5.895±4.003,and that of literal idiom is-5.003±4.555.It shows that the N400 amplitude elicited by processing both related and unrelated probe words in novel idiom metaphor is the largest,followed by conventional idiom metaphor and literal idiom.The present study is concluded:(1)Different semantic gradients of Chinese idiom metaphor do influence the vocabulary processing.That is to say,the word processing under novel idiom metaphor condition needs more effort than that under conventional idiom metaphor condition.(2)Significant differences can be found between Chinese novel and conventional idiom metaphors in the frontal and the central regions.This shows that semantic processing of vocabulary is mainly in the frontal and central areas.