| Conceptual representation has always been an essential part in the field of language research.Traditional propositional symbol theory proposes that conceptual representation has no direct connection with outside world and body experience;meanwhile,it is stored in language memory as abstract symbols.However,perceptual symbol system theory emphasizes the importance of physical experience in conceptual representation.According to perceptual symbol system,perceptual symbol derived from different perceptual experience,external things are stored in the form of multimodal perceptual symbols in the brain and our cognition to outside world is realized by the simulators,composed by the relevant perceptual symbols.Foreign scholars have carried out a series of researchers on the conceptual representation,and verified the conceptual representation of language understanding from the perspective of object shape,color and orientation properties.All these studies found the perceptual representation of object attributes will be automatically activated and affect the related cognitive processing.However,in one hand,most of these studies based on native speakers and rarely investigated second language learners' mental mechanism of conceptual processing.On the other hand,most studies in language comprehension only involved one aspect of object attributes,not involves the multiple object properties.Moreover,the relationship between perceptual information and object words processing is seldom investigated with empirical methods.Therefore,based on perceptual symbol system,the present study aims to explore how different types of perceptual information affect Chinese EFL learners' conceptual processing during object words access,so as to provide empirical evidence to support psychological reality of conceptual representation in language comprehension.To be specific,three research questions are elaborated as follows:(1)How do different types of perceptual information affect Chinese EFL learners' English object words processing?(2)How do different types of perceptual information affect Chinese EFL learners' Chinese object words processing?(3)Are there any differences in perceptual information affecting English and Chinese object words processing?The present study,adopting ERPs technique,is a 4(perceptual information of priming stimulus: color and shape matched the words' referents,color matched but shape mismatched the words' referents,shape matched but color mismatched the words' referents,neither color nor shape matched the words' referents)× 2(language type: English and Chinese)× 2(priming condition: no priming and perceptual information priming)within subject design.20 postgraduates majoring in English Language and Literature from SISU were recruited to participate in the experiments.Participants were required to do a lexical judgement task after carefully saw the priming pictures.Experimental materials were programmed by E-prime and ERPs data was recorded and edited off-line by Neuroscan4.5.Then statistic software SPSS16.0 is used to analyze the data.The experiment is conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU.The experimental results are as follows:(1)According to the behavioral data,under the no perceptual information priming condition,there is marginally difference between the processing English object words and Chinese object words(p=.088).Under the perceptual information priming condition,there is no main effect of processing English object words(p=0.384>0.05).However,the processing under shape matched but color mismatched condition is the fastest,following by color matched but shape mismatched condition;the neither color nor shape matched condition has the most weak impact on words processing.There is no main effect of processing Chinese object words under perceptual information priming condition(p=0.118>0.05).However,the processing under neither color nor shape matched condition is the fastest,following by color matched but shape mismatched condition;the color and shape matched condition has the most weak impact on words processing.All of these reveal that perceptual information does affect Chinese EFL learners' English and Chinese object words processing.(2)As the ERPs data shows,under the no perceptual information priming condition,there is a significant difference between English and Chinese object words processing revealed over the N100,P200 and N400 components(ps<.05).Under the perceptual information priming condition,(1)there is a significant difference of English object word processing in N100,P200,N300 and N400 components.Besides,there is the largest N100,P200,N300 and N400 peak amplitude elicited by neither color nor shape matched condition,which reveals that Chinese EFL learners' conceptual representation in second language is influenced by perceptual information,and participants need to pay more efforts to processing the object words with badly defected perceptual information.(2)There is no statistically significant difference of Chinese object word processing is reveled over the N100 component,while it is obvious in the peak amplitude of P200,N300 and N400 components.There is the largest P200 peak amplitude elicited by neither color nor shape matched condition,the largest N300 peak amplitude elicited by shape matched but color mismatched condition,and the largest N400 peak amplitude elicited by color and shape matched condition.All of these reveal that perceptual information have different impact on Chinese object words processing and could elicit different ERP modulations.To sum up,perceptual information does exert significant influences upon Chinese EFL learners' English and Chinese object words processing.The defect of perceptual symbol information can hinder the processing of object words.On the contrary,it can promote the processing of object words.The comparison between English and Chinese object words processing reveals that there is a perceptual information effect in both two languages.But due to the “priority effect of native language”,the processing of Chinese object word is faster than that of English object word. |
PDF Full Text Request