| Irony,as a main type of figurative language,refers to the use of words contrary to the original meaning to reveal the speaker’s intention of opposition,criticism,ridicule or humor,which plays a crucial role in daily communication.In recent years,the study of irony processing has held more and more attention of scholars in the field of Cognitive Linguistics.For both English native speakers and second language learners,however,it is always much more difficult to comprehend and process English irony.In addition,scholars at home and abroad have been disputing about different theoretical models of irony processing by now.Based on Graded Salience Hypothesis(Giora,1997),salience,as an important factor affecting irony processing,is rarely studied by the previous studies on whether it affects the comprehension and processing of English irony,and is also centered on English native speakers and Indo-European speakers.Moreover,there is no consensus on whether context affects English irony processing.And the previous studies rarely combine salience and context to investigate English irony processing.Therefore,this study attempts to employ Event-Related Potential(ERP)technique to investigate the effects of salience and context on irony processing by Chinese English learners.The thesis aims to address three research questions:(1)What are the effects of salience on English irony processing for Chinese English learners? Is there any difference between high salient meanings and low salient meanings on irony processing?(2)What are the effects of context on English irony processing for Chinese English learners? Is there any difference between literally biasing context and ironically biasing context on processing high salient meanings and low salient meanings?(3)Is there an interaction effect between salience and context on English irony processing for Chinese English learners? Besides,32 Chinese college students of the same English proficiency participated in this experiment,but the behavioral data and the ERP data from 26 participants were finally used in the statistical analysis.After the final selection,the experimental materials were composed of 30 ironic contexts(corresponding to 30 literal contexts),which adopted the form of context(literal context/ironic context)plus judgment sentence(the same sentence),and each context and judgment sentence basically had the same number of words and the same structure.In addition,30 fillers were designed for this experiment in order to avoid experimental effects.Therefore,90 contexts were pseudo-randomly divided into 6 blocks.In each block,the number of two types of target contexts and fillers was balanced.And each judgment sentence,namely,was either its high salient meaning or its low salient meaning.In each block,the number of high and low salient meanings was also balanced.In each trial,the context was presented in two parts,that is,the situational context was firstly presented,and then the comment sentence was presented.After presenting the context,the judgment sentence was finally presented in order to require participants to do semantic judgment tasks.Specifically,participants were asked to judge whether the final sentence was consistent with the context at a given time.What’s more,this experiment adopted 2(salience: high salient meaning,low salient meaning)×2(context: literal context,ironic context)mixed design,and the data was analyzed by two-way repeated measures ANOVA.The major findings of this study are as follows:(1)Through the analysis of behavioral data and ERP data,salience influences English irony processing by Chinese English learners.In terms of behavioral data,participants process low salient meanings much longer than that of high salient meanings,and the accuracy is much lower.In terms of ERP data,low salient meanings elicit more N400 amplitude than high salient meanings,which suggest that low degree of salience signifies more incongruent or unexpected meanings than high degree of salience,so it leads to the difficulty of semantic integration and demands more cognitive efforts to extract or recruit the relevant conceptual knowledge.(2)The present study also suggests that context influences English irony processing by Chinese English learners.In terms of behavioral data,participants process low salient meanings of ironic contexts much longer than that of literal contexts,and the accuracy is much lower.In terms of ERP data,low salient meanings of ironic contexts elicit more N400 amplitude than that of literal contexts,which indicate that participants are less sensitive to low salient meanings of ironic contexts,so ironic contexts require more cognitive efforts for semantic competition.However,when participants process high salient meanings,there is no significant difference between ironic contexts and literal contexts in both behavioral and ERP data,which reflects that high degree of salience is stored and encoded in the mental lexicon,and the degree of entrenchment is exceedingly high,so participants can easily extract and recruit the semantic information without any difficulty.(3)In terms of behavioral data,there is an interaction effect between salience and context in English irony processing by Chinese English learners.In terms of ERP data,however,the interaction effect between salience and context has not reached significant difference.The present study corroborates the psychological reality of salience and supports Graded Salience Hypothesis put forward by Giora.To some extent,this study also shows that irony processing is a form of figurative interpretation that differs from literal language processing.Moreover,the thesis provides a reference for understanding and learning English irony.In English language learning and teaching,teachers can guide students to make use of salience to understand irony,and at the same time pay more attention to the creation of different types of situational contexts so as to cultivate and improve students’ ability in irony communication and intention detection. |
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