Embodied Cognitive Theory Approach To The Audiovisual Cross-Modal Interference Inhibition For Chinese Motion Verb Processing

The motion verb is classified as a subcategory of verb according to the displacement of motion subject,whose essential semantic feature is[+displacement].It is also called displacement verb,or verb with a motion manner.In recent years,studies on motion verbs have focused on its definition,classification,and lexical processing.Although domestic and international scholars have employed various research methods to dig motion verbs from different aspects,a few have conducted researches on motion verb’s intrinsic property,the speed underlying its semantic meaning,let alone researches on the combining of verb speed,lexical processing,and motion behavioral performance.There are still not enough motion verb-relevant researches built on embodied cognition.Based on the embodied cognitive theory,audiovisual cross-modal language processing and interference inhibition,this study uses an audiovisual cross-modal word interference paradigm which is used in the psychological behavioral experiment and uses judgment task to investigate participants’motion verb processing and their inhibitory abilities of motion interference at the same time.The research questions are as follows:(1)Under audiovisual cross-modal interference condition,do congruent attended modal motion verb and incongruent attended modal motion verb yield different results?(2)Under audiovisual cross-modal interference condition,is motion verb processing affected by the interferent pattern?If so,do auditory interference and visual interference have same effect on participants’processing of motion verbs?(3)Does the speed characteristic of motion verb affect its mental processing?If so,how does the speed characteristic affect the processing of motion verbs?This study adopted a three-factors within-subjects experimental design:2(Congruence:congruent condition vs.incongruent condition)×2(interferent pattern:auditory interference vs.visual interference)×2(speed of the verb:fast vs.slow).Factors like congruence,interferent pattern and speed of the verb are independent variables,while reaction time and accuracy are dependent variables.40selected motion verbs(20 fast verbs and 20 slow verbs)formed fast-slow word pairs and were presented in the audiovisual manner(visual text and auditory play).There are two experiments in this study.Experiment One is about the auditory interference under the audiovisual cross-modal condition and therein participants memorize visual text and respond to it,while auditory input is interferent information.After presenting visual and auditory simultaneously,a new visual word is presented on the screen,which asks participants to judge whether visual verb that appears twice was congruent or not.Experiment Two is visual interference.Participants judge whether auditory verbs are congruent,and visual distractive verbs needn’t do responses.42participants participate in these experiments.Their reaction times and accurate responses are collected during tasks.Experimental program coding,procedure running and data collection are operated by the E-prime software.All experimental data are merged and screened through E-prime.Some excel functions(AVERAGE,SUM,STDEV.P)are used to delete extreme values and to figure out the average reaction time under each experimental condition.Finally,preliminarily processed data are input into SPSS to do further statistical analysis.The analytical results from Three-way Repeated Measures ANOVA(F-test)show that there was a significant three-way interaction:Congruence×Interferent pattern×Speed of the verb(F=4.646,p=0.037).The test of simple simple effect and paired sample t-test are applied to know the influence of the three factors on motion verb processing and relationships between factors.Experimental results are as follows:(1)Under auditory and visual interference,participants’responses to incongruent fast motion verbs(t_f=4.541,p_f=0.000<0.05)and slow motion verbs(t_s=-5.254,p_s=0.000<0.05)are longer than congruent condition.(2)It is found that there is a significant modality effect existing in motion verb processing by the comparison of Experiment One and Two.The processing of fast motion verbs(t_f=-17.176,p_f=0.000<0.05)and slow motion verbs(t_s=-15.790,p_s=0.000<0.05)under visual interference condition(Experiment One)takes more time than the processing under the auditory interference condition(Experiment Two).(3)Under auditory interference,there is no significant but a marginally significant difference between fast motion verbs processing and slow motion verbs processing(t=-1.888,p=0.066>0.05).Meanwhile,no significant difference is found between them under visual interference(t=-1.676,p=0.101).In conclusion,under audiovisual cross-modal interference,there is a congruency effect among fast and slow motion verb processing.Meanwhile,the inhibition of auditory interferent information processing is different from the inhibition of visual interferent information processing and there is a modality effect between two of them.The speed characteristic of the motion verb has no impact on its processing.