Department of Behavioral Sciences, Texas A&M International University, 5201 University Boulevard, Laredo, Texas 78041-1900, United States.
Brain Lang. 2011 Mar;116(3):136-50. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2010.09.007. Epub 2010 Oct 13.
This study investigates the contribution of the left and right hemispheres to the comprehension of bilingual figurative language and the joint effects of salience and context on the differential cerebral involvement in idiom processing. The divided visual field and the lexical decision priming paradigms were employed to examine the activation of salient and nonsalient ambiguous idiom interpretations (i.e., literal vs. non-literal) in the two hemispheres. Literally plausible ambiguous idioms, L1 (Polish) and L2 (English), were embedded in unconstraining ambiguous (e.g., I knew he kept an ace up his sleeve) or constraining unambiguous context clearly favoring their conventional idiomatic interpretation (e.g., The debating president kept an ace up his sleeve). Idioms were presented centrally, followed by laterally presented targets related to the figurative (e.g., GAIN) or literal (e.g., SHIRT) meaning of the idiom and displayed at Interstimulus Intervals (ISIs) of 0 ms (Experiment 1), 300 ms (Experiment 2), and 800 ms (Experiment 3). Results indicate that context and salience effects are significantly modulated by the language (native vs. nonnative) of the stimulus materials being presented to each hemisphere. Literal facilitation was found for L2 idioms in all three ISI conditions, which supports the notion of the special status that literal meanings of L2 idioms enjoy in the course of their processing by nonnative language users. No significant differences were found between the right and left hemispheres in regards to their sensitivity to contextual constraints. Results are discussed in terms of the Graded Salience Hypothesis and the Fine/Coarse Coding Theory.
这项研究调查了左半球和右半球对双语比喻语言理解的贡献，以及突显度和语境对成语加工中大脑差异参与的联合影响。使用分视和词汇决策启动范式，研究人员考察了在两个半球中，突显和非突显歧义成语解释（即字面和非字面）的激活情况。可字面理解的歧义成语，L1（波兰语）和 L2（英语），嵌入在没有限制的歧义语境（例如，我知道他留了一手）或有明确限制的非歧义语境中，这些语境明显倾向于其惯用的成语解释（例如，辩论总统留了一手）。成语在中央呈现，然后在横向呈现与成语的比喻（例如，GAIN）或字面（例如，SHIRT）意义相关的目标，并在刺激间间隔（ISIs）为 0 毫秒（实验 1）、300 毫秒（实验 2）和 800 毫秒（实验 3）的情况下呈现。结果表明，语境和突显度的影响受到呈现给每个半球的刺激材料的语言（母语与非母语）显著调节。在所有三个 ISI 条件下，L2 成语都出现了字面促进，这支持了非母语使用者在处理 L2 成语时，其字面意义具有特殊地位的观点。在对语境限制的敏感性方面，右半球和左半球之间没有发现显著差异。结果从突显度分级假说和精细/粗糙编码理论的角度进行了讨论。
