Semantic Processing Of English Polysemous Words:An ERP Study Of Chinese Native Speakers

The semantic acquisition of English polysemous words is a common problem for Chinese native speakers,so the research on the semantic processing of English polysemous words from the perspective of second language can be more effective on improving the way of English polysemous words acquisition for the second language learners.There are two kinds of generative mechanism on polysemy: metaphor and metonymy.The present studies seldom involved the discussion about the generative mechanism.At present,the studies on polysemy are limited to mother language,and the main contention is on whether all senses are respectively represented or only a single core sense is represented.From the perspective of second language,the studies on polysemy are mostly about the language acquisition while few studies explored the processing mechanism of English polysemous words.This research applies ERP and the semantic priming paradigm to investigate the semantic processing of English polysemous words from the perspective of second language,and mainly explores whether two factors(the language proficiency and the generative mechanism)influence the semantic processing of English polysemous words or not.With the multi-factor analysis of variance,we found that there were significant differences in LPC between the language proficiency and the generative mechanism,which indicated that the two factors did influence the semantic processing of English polysemous words.According to the single-factor analysis of variance,we have discovered that when the low-level learners process the metaphor polysemy,the core meaning and the subordinate meaning have no differences on P200 and LPC while the high-level learners process the metaphor polysemy,the core meaning and the subordinate meaning have the differences on P200;when the low-level learners process the metonymy polysemy,the core meaning and the subordinate meaning show the differences on LPC,but when the high-level learners process the metonymy polysemy,the core meaning and the subordinate meaning have no differences.If there is no difference between the processing of the core meaning and the subordinate meaning,it indicates that the representation of the core meaning and the subordinate meaning in the brain is the same,which calls the core-sense representation,whereas the other is the separate-sense representation.So we suggest that with the improvement of the language proficiency,the metaphor polysemy tends to be separate-sense representation while the metonymy polysemy tends to be core-sense representation.