Abstract:
Novel metaphors in literary texts (hereinafter referred to as literary metaphors) seem to be more creative and open-ended in meaning than metaphors in non-literary texts (non-literary metaphors). However, some disagreement still exists on how literary metaphors differ from non-literary metaphors. Therefore, this study explored the neural mechanisms of literary metaphors extracted from modern Chinese poetry by using the methods of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and Event-Related Spectral Perturbations (ERSPs), as compared with non-literary conventional metaphors and literal expressions outside literary texts. Forty-eight subjects were recruited to make the semantic relatedness judgment after reading the prime-target pairs in three linguistic conditions. According to the ERPs results, the earliest differences were presented during the time window of P200 component (170-260 ms) in the frontal and central areas, with the amplitude of P200 for literary metaphors more positive than the other two conditions, reflecting the early allocation of attention and the early conscious experience of the experimental stimuli. Meanwhile, significant differences were presented during the time window of N400 effect (430-530 ms), with the waveform of literary metaphors more negative than others in the frontal and central topography of scalp distributions, suggesting more efforts in retrieving conceptual knowledge for literary metaphors. The ERSPs analysis revealed that the frequency bands of delta and theta were both involved in the cognitive process of literary metaphor comprehension, with delta band distributed in the frontal and central scalp and theta band in parietal and occipital electrodes. Increases in the two power bands during different time windows provided extra evidences that the processing of literary metaphors required more attention and effort than non-literary metaphors and literal expressions in the semantic related tasks, suggesting that the cognitive process of literary metaphors was distinguished by different EEG spectral patterns.
摘要:
文学文本中的小说隐喻(以下简称文学隐喻)似乎比非文学文本中的隐喻(非文学隐喻)更具创造性和意义上的开放性。然而,关于文学隐喻与非文学隐喻的区别仍然存在一些分歧。因此,本研究利用事件相关电位(ERPs)和事件相关谱扰动(ERSPs)的方法,探讨了从现代汉语诗歌中提取文学隐喻的神经机制,与非文学传统隐喻和文学文本之外的文字表达相比。在三种语言条件下阅读主要目标对后,招募了48名受试者进行语义相关性判断。根据ERP的结果,最早的差异出现在正面和中央区域的P200分量的时间窗口(170-260ms)期间,对于文学隐喻,P200的幅度比其他两个条件更积极,反映了早期的注意力分配和实验刺激的早期意识体验。同时,在N400效应的时间窗口(430-530毫秒)期间呈现显著差异,在头皮分布的正面和中央地形中,文学隐喻的波形比其他隐喻更消极,建议在检索文学隐喻的概念知识方面做出更多努力。ERSPs分析发现,delta和theta频段都参与了文学隐喻理解的认知过程,δ带分布在额叶和中央头皮,θ带分布在顶叶和枕骨电极。在不同的时间窗口中,两个功率带的增加提供了额外的证据,表明在语义相关任务中,文学隐喻的处理比非文学隐喻和文字表达需要更多的关注和努力。这表明文学隐喻的认知过程由不同的脑电图谱模式来区分。