The Representation Mechanism Of Second Language Vertical Space Metaphor

Metaphor is a common linguistic phenomenon existing widely in many languages.According to the conceptual metaphor theory,metaphor is the mapping from the original source domain containing a lot of perceptual and motor information to the target domain,so the metaphor is based on embodied information.Current studies on embodied representation in the second language mainly focus on whether the sensorimotor system will be activated in the second language representation which reflects the existence of the embodied effect.While there is a lack of systematic studies on the mechanism and influencing factors of embodied representation in the second language.In this study,304 Chinese（L1）and English（L2）bilingual college students were selected as subjects.Three experiments were designed to explore the embodied representations mechanism of concrete metaphor words and abstract metaphor words in L2 by using the priming task combined with event-related potentials（ERPs）technology.Before formal experiments,a preliminary experiment was conducted to explore the time threshold of second-language word recognition for unbalanced bilinguals.Subjects were required to complete the word judging task,their response accuracy was recorded.It was found that there was no significant difference in the recognition accuracy of the subjects under the conditions of three presentation times(M_60ms=0.74,SD=0.02;M_70ms=0.73,SD=0.02;M_80ms=0.73,SD=0.02).According to the pre-experimental results,the minimum prime word presentation time was set to60ms.In study 1,we investigated the representation mechanism of concrete concepts.Including two small experiments,experiment 1a is 2（metaphor:the congruent metaphor,the conflict metaphor）×3（priming time:80ms,120ms,300ms）,and the dependent variables were the response time and accuracy rate of spatial orientation judgment.The results showed that the response time of 80ms,120ms,and 300ms in the conflict condition was significantly longer than that in the consistent condition,indicating the existence of the metaphorical consistency effect.Since the embodied effect was found under the priming condition of 80ms,combined with the results of the preliminary experiment and the results of existing research on first language,the priming time was further shortened to 60ms to obtain a more accurate time of the embodied effect and to observe whether the embodied effect still existed.And the result showed that a metaphorical consistency effect was still found.These results indicate that the embodied effect exists in L2 concrete word processing and is activated automatically.The second study examined the representation mechanism of abstract words with implicit spatial orientation.And experiment 2 was also divided into two small experiments,experiment 2a and experiment 2b.In experiment 2a,there were three priming times（60ms,80ms,and 120ms）.The results showed that under the three priming times,there was no significant response time difference between the metaphors consistent and metaphors conflict conditions,suggesting that there was no metaphor-consistent effect.In Experiment 2b,the priming time was extended to300ms and 500ms.There was also no significant difference in the response time between the conflicting and consistent conditions.The results indicate that the sensorimotor system was not significantly activated during the representation of abstract metaphorical words.Compared with concrete concepts,abstract concepts are relatively less embodied,which combined with the influence of a low second language proficiency,may make it difficult for abstract metaphorical word representation to show the embodiment effect.The event-related potentials with the high temporal resolution were used in experiment 3 further to explore the representation mechanism of abstract concepts.Three priming times of 80ms,120ms,and 300ms were set to compare the behavioral performance and brain activation.The analysis of the event-related potentials of P1（50～130ms）,N1（130ms～200ms）,P300（200～400ms）,and N400（200～450ms）.The EEG signal（θband,4～8Hz）in0～200ms,200～500ms,and 500～800ms time windows were analyzed by using the time-frequency analysis technique.It is found that the decrease of power in theθband is related to the implicit processing of metaphor,and the increase of power is related to the semantic extraction and integration of new word learning.Behavioral results showed that there was no significant difference in response time and accuracy between metaphor congruence and conflict conditions.In the three kinds of priming time,the difference between the average amplitude of the four brain compositions in the frontal lobe and the parietal area was not significant.The time-frequency analysis results showed that the power of theθband induced by congruent and conflicting conditions in each interest region and time window was not significant.It revealed that abstract metaphor word processing does not show a significant embodied effect,which does not support embodied cognition theory.Further analysis of the non-significant results using JASP software showed that BF_（10）was too small to support the alternative hypothesis.Indeed,substantial evidence exists to support the view that the embodied effect does not exist in abstract metaphor processing.We speculate that the abstract word representation mainly depends on the linguistic representation system rather than the embodied representation system.