语言学论文哪里有？本研究以描述动作动词与宾语冲突的动作动词隐喻为实验材料，采用运动启动研究动作动词隐喻意义的具体化效应。基于以上实验结果和讨论，可以得出以下主要结论。首先，感觉运动系统涉及对动作动词隐喻的理解。
1 Introduction
1.2 Research Objectives and Questions
The embodied effect in language comprehension has been testified by a number of previous studies, which mainly focused on literal actions [14, 17-20] without laying enough emphasis on action-verb metaphors. Action-verb metaphors refer to actions which cannot be performed with a body effector physically. In terms of the amodal view, sensorimotor systems play an epiphenomenal role in language comprehension. Conversely, sensorimotor systems play a significant role in language comprehension based on the embodied view. Therefore, it is doubt that whether processing metaphoric sense of action verbs involves the embodied simulation of real actions. Adopting motor priming paradigm, the research objectives of the present study can be summarized into two points: (1) Investigate the embodied effect in the comprehension of Chinese action-verb metaphors; (2) Compare the embodied effect in the comprehension of Chinese action-verb metaphors with that in alphabetic languages of previous researches.
Based on two research objectives, following research questions will be answered:
(1) Does the embodied effect occur in comprehending Chinese action-verb metaphors?
(2) If it does, is the effect the same as other alphabetic languages in the comprehension of action-verb metaphors?
3 Methodology
3.1 Participants
A total of 120 healthy Chinese native university students participated in the experiment. All participants are right-handed with normal or corrected-to-normal vision (60 males and 60 females; mean age = 22.4 years, SD = 2.95), recruited by advertising in social media. All participants volunteered to do the experiment and all participants got a gift after the experiment.
The experiment was divided into two phases: learning phase and test phase. In the learning phase, participants learned the correlation between icons and corresponding actions and how to perform these actions by watching a video. In the test phase, each participant read 15 action-verb metaphors, five action-verb metaphors with a matching prime, another five action-verb metaphors with a mismatching prime and the last five with no prime. Fillers were primed with these three types as well. Between trials, a filler phrase was presented. The order of presentation was randomized and counter-balanced.
5 Discussion
5.1 Facilitation in the Matching Condition
The finding of a processing advantage for action-verb metaphor comprehension in the matching prime condition is in consistent with previous studies [21, 83]. Behavioral results in the present study supported the embodied effect in action-verb metaphor comprehension even at the phrasal level as RTs in the matching prime condition were shorter than those in no-prime condition which is in line with previous studies, further favoring the embodied view, but rejecting the amodal view. That means, even the metaphoric meaning of action verbs contains the action content which can activate sensorimotor systems [72], thus the activated sensorimotor systems in this study can promote subsequent action-verb metaphor comprehension. And the icons adopted in the present study helped avoid the lexical priming effect and the analyses of the post-test verified that the observed promoted comprehension in the matching condition was not a result of lexical priming effect, supporting the involvement of sensorimotor systems in action-verb metaphor comprehension.
5.2 Interference in the Mismatching Condition
Behavioral results in the mismatching prime condition, revealed that a different body effector prime interfered the subsequent action-verb metaphor comprehension. However, the statistical analysis demonstrated a significant difference in RTs between the mismatching prime condition and no-prime condition, which is different from previous studies on action-verb metaphor comprehension [21, 83]. Although Wilson and Gibbs observed a main effect for prime type in both participants and items, RTs for no-prime condition and the mismatching prime condition did not significantly differ in subsequent independent t-tests [83]. Different from materials selection in Wilson and Gibbs [83], the mismatching action prime used in the present study is executed by a different body effector with subsequent action-verb metaphor comprehension. Concretely, actions in the mismatching prime condition in Wilson and Gibbs’s study were not clear. No significant difference observed in the comparison between the mismatching condition and no-prime condition can because they didn’t adopt actions executed by a different body effector as mismatching primes [83].
6 Conclusions
6.1 Major Findings
The present research chose action-verb metaphors describing a conflict between action verbs and objects as experimental materials and employed motor priming to investigate the embodied effect of the metaphoric sense of action verbs. On the ground of the above experimental results and discussion, the following major findings can be concluded.
Firstly, sensorimotor systems involve in the comprehension of action-verb metaphors. The facilitation observed in the matching prime condition supported that the metaphoric sense of action verbs is partially embodied rather than totally symbolic or amodal. Although the metaphoric sense of action verbs did not refer to actions that can be performed physically, the activated specific body-effector motor system can promote subsequent action-verb metaphor comprehension where the action verb is executed by the same body effector, suggesting that the metaphoric sense of action verbs is embodied to some extent. The present study investigated the embodied effect of Chinese action-verb metaphor comprehension in native speakers, providing more evidence in the embodied studies in language comprehension.
Secondly, the embodied effect observed in the present study is different from previous studies in alphabetic languages to some extent. More concretely, the difference between mismatching prime and no-prime condition was found, which is different from previous studies. The study selected Chinese specific body-effector-related action-verb metaphors as the experimental materials. Verbs are all body-effector–related, therefore, mismatching prime and target verbs in action-verb metaphor comprehension executed by a different body effector in the mismatching condition can capture a clearer picture about the embodied effect in action-verb metaphor comprehension.
Finally, the action content of the metaphoric sense of action verbs may be relevant to body effector. The mismatching advantage in the mismatching condition was not observed in previous studies in alphabetic languages. In Schaller et al. [21] study, they used verbs with same effectors in the mismatching condition and found the facilitation in the mismatching condition as well. In the first experiment conducted by Wilson and Gibbs, they didn’t depict verbs in the mismatching condition using same effector or not and they only described those verbs as mismatching primes [83].
reference(omitted)
