The Influences Of Co-verbal Gestures On Chinese Metaphor Comprehension

Metaphor has no longer been regarded as the language ornament since the cognitive linguistics and cognitive semiotics gained their grounds at the end of 20^thcentury.It is widely acknowledged that human being’s conceptual system is fundamentally metaphoric,motivating a great number of scholars to explain and verify that metaphor structures our thought,perception and action.Metaphor study has gone beyond verbal language level to non-verbal level by postulating that non-verbal languages such as hand gestures are also metaphoric and communicative-pragmatic.Gesture,language and thought have referential and retrieval relationship.Currently the metaphoricity of co-verbal hand gestures and its relationship with the cognitive processing of language comprehension,especially metaphoric language,is becoming more and more important.The present study refers to Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff as theoretical foundation and uses Mc Neill gesture classification:iconic and metaphoric.The present study used metaphoric and iconic gestures as research stimuli to explore the embodiment of metaphoric language processing,the facilitating effect of co-verbal gestures on meaning retrieval,and the functions of co-verbal gestures in metaphor comprehension.The study aims to address two issues:the influences of consistency of co-verbal gestures on language comprehension;the influences of co-verbal gestures on metaphor comprehension.The study consists of pretests and 2 experiments.Pretests and Experiment One were conducted to select the final research stimuli by rating metaphoricity and comprehensibility.The final materials are 60 sentences,30 metaphors and 30 literal sentences,each with 7-9Chinese characters,together with 60 self-made video stimuli.Experiment Two is a 2（expression conditions:metaphoric and literal）x 3（gesture conditions:congruent,incongruent and absent）within-subject experiment in which participants were asked to watch the videos and respond to the target questions.Reaction time and accuracy were recorded to test the influences of congruent gestures and incongruent gestures on sentence comprehension.The results show that congruent gestures can facilitate the comprehension of metaphors and literal sentences.The data of incongruent gestures does not show any significant differences with the independent speech,but the accuracy has significant differences,and the accuracy of incongruent gestures is the lowest.When gestures are congruent,the promotion effect of the understanding of metaphorical expression will be more obvious than that of literal meaning.The study shows that speech and gesture are semantically related to each other with form and meaning which is in line with the gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis.Congruent gestures provide the matched information for the context which serves as a promoter in language comprehension.Incongruent gesture provides ambiguous or wrong information which would impede the comprehension.When gestures are congruent with speech,the metaphor comprehension is faster,which supports the graded salience hypothesis.Gesture highlights the message expressed in speech,gesture’s information and metaphor’s message are integrated better,so the processing is faster.The influences of metaphoric and iconic gestures on metaphor comprehension shed a light on the semantic relation of co-verbal gesture signs and language comprehension.The present study provides the practical significance that co-verbal gestures can be used in teaching and daily communication.They can promote the comprehension of abstract or metaphoric language.