Cognitive Load And Individual Differences In Processing Ideational Grammatical Metaphor: An Eye-tracking Study

As the main form of ideational grammatical metaphor(IGM),nominalization is widely used in academic texts and leads to difficulty of academic reading to great extent.Some scholars attribute that to increased lexical density as a result of nominalization,which adds to information load of sentence.Systemic functional linguistics(SFL)headed by Halliday holds that processing difficulty is the innate property of IGM in that it is the result of human’s cognitive development,serving as a significant cognitive means to form concepts and construct experiential world for human beings.Using eye-tracking technique,this study investigates processing difficulty and individual cognitive differences in comprehension of ideational grammatical metaphor.Thirty-eight students from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China who had passed College English Test-Band 6(CET-6)volunteered to participate in this experiment.With eye movement tracked throughout,they were required to read15 sentences of congruent form and 15 sentences of metaphoric form respectively at their own speed and complete comprehension tests afterwards.Congruent form refers to the sentences in which the semantic layer and the grammatical layer of language match by expressing process with verb,state with adjective and entity with noun.The sentences in metaphorical form were adapted from those in congruent form by nominalizing the target verbs or adjectives.The important factors that may influence comprehension difficulty such as lexical density,word frequency,sentence length,syntactic complexity,semantic explicitness and appropriateness were controlled between two types of sentences in this study.After reading on the computer,students finished scales and tests that are used to measure cognitive abilities in visual imagery,multi-dimensional creativity,reasoning intelligence and semantic association.Paired samples t-tests were firstly conducted to compare the eye movement measures between congruent form and metaphorical form.Results showed that longer dwell time,re-reading time and more fixations and regressions of eye movement were found for reading metaphorical form,which indicates that metaphorical form requires more cognitive load to process than congruent from regardless of syntactic complexity.Secondly,partial correlation analyses with CET-6 scores controlled were conducted to examine whether there was correlation between students’ cognitive abilities and reading performance of IGM.Results suggest that students with higher reasoning intelligence or higher musical creativity have more accurate comprehension of IGM.Besides,students with higher visual imagery ability experience less processing difficulty in comprehension of IGM.Based on eye-tracking technique,this study investigates the processing difficulty and individual cognitive differences in comprehension of ideational grammatical metaphor.It firstly provides empirical evidence for cognitive aspect of grammatical metaphor theory that has been elucidated by Halliday,and secondly provides scientific suggestions for teaching academic reading to English foreign language(EFL)learners under such a global context in which English education in the colleges of China is undergoing a transition from English for general purpose(EGP)to English for specific purpose(ESP).