Frame-shifting instead of incongruity is necessary for pun comprehension : evidence from an ERP study on Chinese homophone puns

Recent psycholinguistic research has made significant progress in understanding the meaning-access process during pun comprehension. However, to date, little research has directly investigated how the two retrieved meanings are integrated into the pun context afterwards. In the current ERP study, we examined this process by comparing homophone puns with two control conditions. Different from previous ERP studies on jokes, we did not observe significantly enhanced N400 amplitudes (300-500 ms) in the pun condition, indicating no apparent detection of incongruity. However, we observed a sustained positivity around the left anterior regions (500-900 ms) and enhanced LPC amplitudes around the central-parietal regions (600-900 ms). These two components could index the sudden access to the second meaning and the additional integration operations to establish a new cognitive model respectively. These findings were compatible with the Space Structure Model, which emphasises the frame-shifting process as a crucial element for understanding verbal humour

Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks : evidence from pun comprehension

Empirical findings on embodied cognition have shown that bodily states (e.g., bodily postures and affective states) can influence how people appreciate humor. A case in point is that participants were reported to read pleasant sentences faster than the unpleasant controls when their muscles responsible for smiling were activated. However, little research has examined whether the feeling of amusement derived from humor processing like pun comprehension can exert a backward influence on ongoing cognitive tasks. In the present study, the participants’ eye movements were tracked while they rated the comprehensibility of humorous sentences (homophone puns) and two types of unfunny control sentences (congruent and incongruent). Fixation measures showed an advantage in the critical homophone region for the congruent controls relative to the homophone puns; however, this pattern was reversed in terms of total sentence reading time. In addition, the humor rating scores acquired after the eye-tracking experiment were found negatively correlated to the overall sentence reading time, suggesting that the greater amusement the participant experienced the faster they would finish the rating task. Taken together, the current results indicate that the positive affect derived from humor can in turn provide immediate feedback to the cognitive system, which enhances text comprehension. As a result, the current finding provides more empirical evidence for the exploration of the interaction between the body and cognition

The effect of salience on Chinese pun comprehension : a visual world paradigm study

The present study adopted the printed-word visual world paradigm to investigate the salience effect on Chinese pun comprehension. In such an experiment, participants listen to a spoken sentence while looking at a visual display of four printed words (including a semantic competitor, a phonological competitor, and two unrelated distractors). Previous studies based on alphabetic languages have found robust phonological effects (participants fixated more at phonological competitors than distractors during the unfolding of the spoken target words), while controversy remains regarding the existence of a similar semantic effect. A recent Chinese study reported reliable semantic effects in two experiments using this paradigm, suggesting that Chinese participants could actively map the semantic input from the auditory modality with the semantic information retrieved from printed words. In light of their study, we designed an experiment with two conditions: a replication condition to test the validity of using the printed-word world paradigm in Chinese semantic research, and a pun condition to assess the role played by salience during pun comprehension. Indeed, global analyses have revealed robust semantic effects in both experimental conditions, where participants were found more attracted to the semantic competitors than to the distractors with the emergence of target words. More importantly, the local analyses from the pun condition have shown that the participants were more attracted to the semantic competitors related to the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun than to those related to the less salient meanings within 200 ms after target word offset. This finding suggests that the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun is activated and assessed faster than its less salient counterpart. The initial advantage observed in the present study is consistent with the prediction of the graded salience hypothesis rather than the direct access model

Translation directionality and translator anxiety : evidence from eye movements in L1-L2 translation

While considerable research on the impact of anxiety on second language learning has been carried out in international contexts, the impact of anxiety on the translator’s undertaking L2 translation, a sort of anxiety arising from the translation directionality, as well as the structure of cognitive mechanism for translational anxiety, remain under-explored. Adopting the eye-tracking and key-logging approach to data collection, this study implemented an eye-tracking experiment with EFL learners at a Chinese university to probe into how the participants responded to L1 and L2 translation-tasks and the mechanism involved in these processes. It is found that translation directionality does have a great impact on the processing of translation, which causes the change of cognitive load and then leads to the change of levels in translator anxiety. The finding further confirms the key premises of the Processing Proficiency Model and the Revised Hierarchical Model with attendant implications for translation processes

The roles of familiarity and context in processing Chinese xiehouyu : an ERP study

This study conducts an ERP experiment to explore the online processing mechanism of Chinese xiehouyu, a subcategory of Chinese idiomatic expressions with a metaphorical two-part allegorical saying, regarded as a non-literal language construct. Using a 2 × 2 design, (high familiarity (HF)/low familiarity (LF)) × (literally-biasing context (LC)/metaphorically-biasing context (MC)), the researchers have obtained the following findings: (1) familiarity plays an important role in Chinese xiehouyu processing, i.e. the metaphorical meaning of a HF Chinese xiehouyu can be directly activated while that of a LF one has to be derived from its literal meaning first; (2) contextual information also weighs in the process, i.e. the metaphorical meaning of a Chinese xiehouyu can be promoted in MC condition but suppressed in LC condition; (3) the interactive effect of familiarity and contextual information can be explained by the career of metaphor hypothesis; and (4) the Standard Pragmatic Model (SPM) of non-literal languages can explain the processing of LF xiehouyu, and the Direct Access Model (DAM) may to some extent account for the mechanism of HF one but fails to explain the case of LF one, while the Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH) can provide an acceptable explanation for the processing mechanism of Chinese xiehouyus of varied familiarity

(Chinese Metaphorical Cognition & its ERP Imaging)

With the development of human society to the twenty-first century, man has learned a great deal of the natural world around him by resorting to the power of science and technology. However, man knows little about his own brain and its function on which he depends to understand and explore the natural world. It is said that the twenty-first century should be an era of cognition, an era of brain science. Indeed, talking about cognition without the mental function of the brain is equal to talking about the universe without heavenly bodies. The chief mental function of the brain is thinking, which involves language, logic, calculation, analysis, music, fine arts, imagination, creation and so on. Metaphorical thinking is an important way of thinking with language, whose process ought to be run under the framework of the cognition in the brain. Metaphor is a way of thinking as well as a form of language. Therefore, metaphorical thinking has its unique forms, characteristics and functions. The study for metaphors has a long history. However, such study was once restricted within the field of rhetoric research over a long period. Since the 1980s, the foreign researchers have successively put forward a series of theories concerning metaphorical cognition, and thus expanded its scope from linguistics into the whole cognitive science whose purpose is to reveal the law of man’s thinking. Meanwhile, the rapid advance of the means of neuroscience enables us to observe the neuro-mechanism of language cognition on line via electrophysiological methods. Recently, resorting to the constantly updated techniques of neural imaging and analysis, some western scholars have attempted to explore the neuro-mechanism of metaphorical cognition by means of ERP (Event-related Potential) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) in order to profoundly probe into the conventional issue of the relationship between language and thought. Following their steps, the author has also tried to do the research on metaphorical cognition by means of electrophysiology. But different from them, this research has focused on Chinese metaphorical cognition via ERP experiment. Therefore, the ERP experiment has been conducted with some Chinese metaphors and control literal sentences. 20 native Chinese undergraduates majoring science as subjects were asked to perform the experiment. Their behavioral data and ERP data were recorded on line and analyzed off line. The results have been discussed to offer the explanation for the unique dynamic neuro-mechanism of the Chinese metaphorical cognition. On the basis of the existing theories of metaphorical cognition and from the perspective of brain information processing, the dissertation tries to verify metaphorical cognitive theories by ERP experimental results and to do research on Chinese metaphorical cognition in the framework of the linguistic cognition of the brain

(Mind reading and metaphor)

Metaphor is a universal and important language phenomenon. As language is closely related to our brain, we can explore the complicated language processing mechanism by researching the brain, and in turn we can know the brain structures and their functions by studying language (Wang, 2010). In order to know the metaphor comprehension process, we should not only conduct research on its cognitive modals from the perspective of language, but also on its mental processing from the perspective of neural mechanism of the brain, as the process of metaphor comprehension is a mind reading process that undergoes within the united cognitive framework of human brain. This chapter extracts from Chinese Metaphorical Cognition & Its ERP Imaging (Wang, 2009) the contents concerning how human brain interprets metaphor to elaborate on the relationship between metaphor comprehension and mind reading. At first it discusses the representative processing modals of metaphor comprehension, and then reviews the researches on neural mechanism of metaphor cognition, based on which it introduces the study on neural mechanism of Chinese metaphorical cognition by means of ERP techniques so as to display the process and mode of mental interpretation of Chinese metaphors

(Thinking and language)

The relationship between thinking and language is an issue concerned by linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and even artificial intelligence (AI) specialists. However, it remains a problem without an agreeable and unimpeachable solution. Faced with such a situation, the author tries to explain the relationship between thinking and language by comparing the non-homology and asynchronism of the evolution and development between thinking and language, by exploring thinking with and without language, and by probing into slips of tongue and their causes, which not only contributes to the understanding of their relationship, but also promotes the knowledge of human cognition

(Blending of metaphorical cognition)

Integration plays a very important role in cognitive process. A large quantity of irrelevant input information is to be integrated or blended into concepts in the neural network system of our brain. With the integrated information, people can more reasonably know the objective world as well as the subjective world. Metaphor cognition is no exception as people can blend those concepts seemingly spread in two irrelevant domains to construct a new integrated concept by matching and mapping the separately stored information in the related brain areas. The notion of blending of metaphorical cognition will be introduced in the following three parts. Part One will introduce the cognitive metaphor theories within the same framework, in particular Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998, 2002) and Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Part Two will discuss multimodal metaphors by expounding the different modals with which metaphors exist. Part Three will look into how the multimodal metaphor forms an intergraded concept in the neural network system from the perspective of information processing in the brain

(Multi-approaches to metaphor research)

Today, metaphor research is switching from mono-modal to multi-modal, from the study in a single field to the study in cross-over fields, from qualitative study to quantitative study. Especially by such advanced computer-assisted methods or neuroimaging experiments as corpus, ERP, fMRI and eye tracking, it is possible for us to break through the current research on metaphors. It is believed that multi-approaches to metaphor research will surely promote this interdisciplinary study in depth