Comprehending Chinese Literary And Non-literary Metaphors: An ERP Study

A good number of neurophysiologic researches have been conducted to explore the neural mechanisms of metaphor processing, but few studies have taken the distinction between literary and non-literary metaphor comprehension into consideration.In this study we use Chinese literary metaphor processing event-related potentials (ERP) experiment to see whether Chinese metaphor processing has its unique mechanism and to examine whether there exist neural mechanism differences between comprehension of Chinese metaphor in literature and non-literary metaphors. With its advantage of high temporal resolution, ERP is used in the current study to investigate whether the amplitudes of N400 and LPC provide sensitive indices of differences between Chinese literary metaphors and non-literary metaphors and to see whether Chinese metaphors in literature and outside literature are processed in different locations in the brain. The N400 is investigated across two time-windows:(1) the Early N400 (350ms-400ms) and (2) the Late N400 (400ms-450ms). LPC is also investigated across two time windows:(1) 750ms-800ms and (2) 800ms-850ms.The behavior results of this experiment yield evidence that people made more errors and took longer time when deciding that a literary metaphorical expression had metaphorical meaning than when deciding that a non-literary metaphor had metaphorical meaning and that a literal sentence did not have metaphorical meaning, which, to some extent, indicating that it was easier for them to understand non-literary metaphors and literal sentences than literary metaphors.The analyses of the N400 and LPC components provide statistical evidence to show that the neural correlates of Chinese literary metaphor processing differ from that of Chinese non-literary metaphor processing. N400 amplitudes are triggered in a graded manner:literary metaphors triggering the largest N400, metaphors outside literature the next, and literal expressions the smallest. Furthermore, literary metaphors evoke more positive LPCs. Our data do not support cognitive theorists" Conceptual Metaphor Theory of literary metaphor comprehension, but partially support the Gradient Salience hypothesis.As for the brain localization of literary and non-literary metaphor comprehension, our findings suggest that relative to literal sentences and non-literary metaphors, both hemispheres were activated in processing literary metaphors, which yielded evidence for the difference in the brain regions in comprehending literary and non-literary metaphors.To sum up, the current study yields empirical evidence for the differences between literary metaphor and non-literary metaphor comprehension, which extends the relevant studies home and abroad and possibly helps to advance the understanding of how Chinese metaphor in literature can work.