An ERP Study On The Mental Simulation Of Implied Object Color Information During Chinese Sentence Comprehension

Embodied cognition theory assumes that while sentence comprehension, readers would activate the perceptual mental representation of what they read such as object shape, orientation. Some of previous studies that including implicit object color information in language comprehension support the hypothesis of embodied cognition theory, however others do not. This study explored the mental processing of implied objects color information during Chinese sentence comprehension and the effect of color prototypicality, by sentence-picture matching paradigm while using Event-related Potentials technique(ERP).The experiment is 2×2 two factors within-subjects design. One of the independent variables is the object color implied in the sentence(typical color or atypical color of the object); the other is sentence-picture matching condition(match or mismatch). The dependent variables are the reaction times and the brain electrical activities(N400 as index) when participants judge pictures after reading sentences. The key objects involved in the sentences and the pictures contain two common colors, part is from the paper written by Connell and Lynott(2009), the other part is newly added. All of the materials were judged by three ways: familiarity, color prototypicality, the match degree of sentence-picture. During the experiment, participants first read sentences implying a typical or atypical color of one object and then watched the pictures. All of 20 subjects' reaction times were analyzed with repeated measures ANOVA. The behavior result showed that the reaction time is shorter when subjects judge the match pictures than the mismatch, subjects judge the sentences imply typical color is faster than the atypical ones; The ERP result showed that after reading typical color sentence, the ERP triggered by mismatched picture showed a larger N400 amplitude than the matched, while after reading atypical color sentence, there was no significant difference of the N400 amplitude between the match and mismatch pictures. By the way, further analysis suggested that the N400 difference is distributed in the frontal lobe, and the N400 difference in the left and right hemispheres is reverse: the ERP showed a larger N400 amplitude by the mismatch picture in the left, and a larger N400 amplitude by the matched in the right temporal.Both behavioral results and ERP findings suggested that readers do activate perceptual mental representation of objects and their color property during Chinese sentence comprehension. In addition, the prototypicality of the object color implied in the sentence may influence the specific object color represented, further have impact on subsequent cognitive determine.