The Effect Of Cognitive Styles On Irony Processing

Non-literal language has always been a hot topic in psycholinguistic research.As a representative and widely used figurative language,irony has attracted extensive attention in the fields of linguistics,medicine and cognitive neuroscience,with rich research results,which plays an important role in further expanding the cognitive processing model of language.How do linguistic and non-linguistic factors affect the processing of non-literal language? Is there secondary processing in irony comprehension? These issues remain controversial.Based on these issues,the present research has formed five representative theoretical models: the standard pragmatic view(Grice,1975;Searle,1979),the direct access view(Gibbs,1994),the graded salience view(Giora,1997;2003),constraint-satisfaction framework(Katz,2005;Katz &Ferretti,2001;Pexman,2008).The individual differences related to the speaker and the receiver are important nonverbal cues that influence the non-literal language understanding.Field cognitive style as an important individual differences,different field cognitive style individuals adopted differnt methods to processing the surrounding information,and use this information to guide their behavior.Researchers have found that the individuals of different cognitive style showed many a great deal of significant difference,such as working memory,reading comprehension and so on(Li,Xu,& Chen,2010;Jia,Zhang,& Li,2014).However,the effect of field cognitive style on cognitive processing of irony has not been investigated from the perspective of individual differences of normal groups.According to the above issues,this study from the perspective of individual differences of field cognitive style to investigate the factors that have influence on irony cognitive processing and the neural mechanism of irony processing.This researchincludes two experiments: Experiment 1 using the eye movement technology to collect the eye movement data,including the first pass reading time,the regression path reading time and the total reading time in the pre-critical area,critical area and the post-critical area respectively,via this data,we could analysis the cognitive processing of irony and the effect of non-linguistic factor on the irony processing.Experiment 2adopted ERPs technology to explore the neural mechanism of the effect of field cognitive style on the cognitive processing of irony,and analyzed the N400 and LPC components,the accuracy rate of language comprehension and response time were be recorded.Through this way,we can observe the brain mechanism of cognitive processing of irony from a higher temporal resolution.Through these experiments,the flowing findings are obtained:1.In the process of irony processing,literal semantics should be processed first,and semantic integration processing should be carried out after the conflict between irony-words and context was recognized;Compared with the literal language,the processing time of irony is longer,and the processing of irony involves the reanalysis process,which supports the standard pragmatic view.2.Cognitive style,as a non-verbal cue,has an effect on cognitive processing of irony from the early stage and continues to the late stage of semantic integration,supporting the constraint-satisfaction framework.3.Field-dependent individuals are greatly affected in the semantic conflict recognition stage of cognitive processing of irony,and less cognitive resources are invested in the late semantic integration stage.4.The cognitive processing of irony involves not only the left hemisphere,but also the right hemisphere,supporting the hypothesis of coarse semantic coding in the right hemisphere of non-literal language processing.