Li Ying, Lu Xiaoxiao, Wang Yizhen, Wang Hanlin, Wang Yue
School of Education, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China.
School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 13;13:877997. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.877997. eCollection 2022.
The theory of embodied semantics holds that verbal metaphors are strongly grounded in sensorimotor experience. Many studies have proven that besides sensorimotor simulation, the comprehension of verbal metaphors also requires semantic abstraction. But the interaction between simulation and abstraction, as well as the time course of metaphorical meaning integration, is not well understood. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether embodiment or abstraction, or both, is employed in the processing of Chinese verbal metaphor. Participants were asked to read subject-verb metaphorical, verb-object metaphorical, literal-concrete and literal-abstract sentences, and the target words were measured at the verb and the object of each sentence. The results revealed that a similar N400 effect was elicited by the target verbs in the verb-object metaphorical and the literal-concrete sentences, and a similar P600/LPC effect was induced by the target verbs in the subject-verb metaphorical and the literal-abstract sentences, reflecting that the verb-object metaphors trigger a simulation process, while the subject-verb metaphors trigger an abstraction process in the verb processing stage. Moreover, the subject-verb metaphors elicited a stronger P600/LPC effect by the target verbs than the verb-object metaphors, but there was no difference of the P600/LPC caused by the target objects between the two kinds of metaphors, revealing that the metaphorical meaning of a subject-verb metaphor is integrated in the verb processing stage, while that of a verb-object metaphor is reanalyzed in the object processing stage. These results suggest that a verbal metaphor is processed both by simulation and abstraction, and the metaphorical meaning is integrated immediately with the unfolding of the sentence meaning. The position where the semantic conflict lies in a sentence (verb vs. object) modulates the time course of metaphor sentence comprehension.
具身语义学理论认为，言语隐喻深深扎根于感觉运动体验之中。许多研究已经证明，除了感觉运动模拟之外，言语隐喻的理解还需要语义抽象。但是模拟与抽象之间的相互作用，以及隐喻意义整合的时间进程，目前还没有得到很好的理解。在本研究中，我们旨在探究在汉语言语隐喻的加工过程中，是采用了具身化还是抽象化，抑或是两者兼而有之。参与者被要求阅读主谓隐喻句、动宾隐喻句、字面具体句和字面抽象句，并对每个句子的动词和宾语处的目标词进行测量。结果显示，动宾隐喻句和字面具体句中的目标动词引发了相似的N400效应，主谓隐喻句和字面抽象句中的目标动词引发了相似的P600/LPC效应，这表明动宾隐喻在动词加工阶段触发了一个模拟过程，而主谓隐喻在动词加工阶段触发了一个抽象过程。此外，主谓隐喻中目标动词引发的P600/LPC效应比动宾隐喻更强，但两种隐喻中目标宾语引发的P600/LPC效应没有差异，这表明主谓隐喻的隐喻意义在动词加工阶段进行整合，而动宾隐喻的隐喻意义在宾语加工阶段进行重新分析。这些结果表明，言语隐喻是通过模拟和抽象来加工的，并且隐喻意义随着句子意义的展开而立即整合。句子中语义冲突所在的位置（动词与宾语）调节了隐喻句理解的时间进程。
