The Effects Of Vertical Spatial Metaphor On L2 Emotional Word Processing

Emotions are crucial to individuals’ lives and significantly impact their mental processes.As a result,the relationship between emotion and language has garnered significant attention from linguists.A new breakthrough in this field involves the classification of emotion-laden and emotion-label words.Additionally,spatial metaphor has gained significant attention in the field of psychology.However,studies that consider both aspects of the topic are scarce.Therefore,this study utilizes E-prime to explore the effects of vertical spatial metaphor on L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden word processing and to investigate the orientation of this metaphorical mapping.The study involved 63 English majors from a university in Shandong Province,including 31 participants for Experiment 1 and 32 participants for Experiment 2,in order to explore the effects of vertical spatial metaphor on L2 emotion-label and emotionladen word processing.In Experiment 1,a separate emotional word judgment task(including emotional word memory)and a space detection task were conducted to assess the effect of spatial metaphor on emotional word processing in the vertical space.In Experiment 2,the order of the two tasks was reversed to explore whether the metaphorical mapping is bidirectional.The results of these experiments indicated that:(1)Vertical spatial metaphor had an effect on the L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden word processing.Specifically,the upper space had close relationship with L2 positive emotional word processing,whereas the lower space had close relationship with L2 negative emotional word processing.The spatial metaphor effect was found to be stronger in L2 emotion-label word processing than in L2 emotion-laden word processing.(2)The mapping in L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden word processing was bidirectional,but weaker from the target domain to the source domain.To sum up,it is demonstrated that valence,word type,and location jointly influence L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden word processing,and impact the effects of vertical spatial metaphor on the emotional word processing.In addition,the study shows that the mapping of vertical spatial metaphor in emotional word processing is bidirectional.In conclusion,this study provides empirical evidence for relevant theories and confirms the applicability of embodied cognition perspectives in emotional word processing.Additionally,it fills the gap in studies on metaphorical mapping orientation in emotional word processing and offers more insights for L2 vocabulary teaching practice.