An ERP Study On Bilingual Processing Order Of Chinese And English Metaphors

One of the central concerns of the metaphor processing mechanism inneurocognitive studies lies in the sequence of metaphorical language processing.The presentation of researches on bilingual figurative language processing provides a much-needed bilingual perspective in the broad field of figurative language.Thereinto,metaphor processing mechanism in the second language(L2),especially the sequence of metaphorical language processing,might present different patterns in two languages for bilinguals.Then the question comes up: is the model of monolingual processing suitable for bilingual metaphor comprehension?By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective,the current study aims to investigate the processing order during metaphor processing in the first language(L1)and the second language(L2).Research questions are as followings: 1)Are there any differences between Chinese and English metaphor processing for Chinese(L1)-English(L2)bilinguals? 2)What procedure is employed by Chinese-English bilinguals on Chinese and English metaphors? 3)Is the procedure of Chinese-English bilingual metaphor processing a one-step processing or two-step processing?Two experiments are designed accordingly.In the Exp1,combined with a priming paradigm,20 Chinese-English bilingual students with high proficiency of English are employed in the experiments to do a relatedness judgment on 180 familiar metaphors(90 Chinese,90 English)randomly matched with 3 types of targets(literal,metaphorical,unrelated).The time interval between metaphors and targets are respectively controlled in 100 ms,300 ms and 500 ms to get a preliminary results on the literal and metaphorical meaning activation.In the Exp2,an event-related potential(ERP)experiment combined with the masked priming paradigm,18 subjects performed a meaningfulness judgment task on 88 metaphors(44 Chinese,44 English)with 3 types of primes(literal,metaphorical,unrelated).The results of Exp1 revealed that Chinese metaphors consumed less time and responded more correctly than English metaphors irrespective of intervals and target types,which indicates the native language advantage of Chinese metaphor processing.The longer interval makes the metaphorical meaning of familiar metaphors more salient,so both Chinese and English metaphor processing support the Graded Salience Hypothesis.ERP findings in Exp2 demonstrated that Chinese metaphors evoked smaller P200 amplitudes in frontal sites,which could be explained by higher subjective frequency usage of L1.The N400 amplitude in centro-parietal and parietal sites for Chinese metaphors is higher,possibly indicating stronger semantic interconnectivity for L1 within the memory system.Compared with L1,a delay in response to metaphors inL2 supports the temporal delay assumption postulated by the BIA+ model;More resource intensive cognitive mechanisms is revealed by the sustained negativity.From the results we can see that Chinese-English learners employed a one-step processing strategy on familiar metaphors,only different in the early processing stage,basically supports the Graded Salience Hypothesis and Defaultness Hypothesis.By focusing on the sequence of bilingual metaphor processing,the current study provides insights into the brain mechanism of bilingual metaphor processing and further explains the way of bilingual language representation in human mind.