Chinese Metaphorical Cognition & its ERP Imaging

With the development of human society to the twenty-first century, man has learned a great deal of the natural world around him by resorting to the power of science and technology. However, man knows little about his own brain and its function on which he depends to understand and explore the natural world. It is said that the twenty-first century should be an era of cognition, an era of brain science. Indeed, talking about cognition without the mental function of the brain is equal to talking about the universe without heavenly bodies. The chief mental function of the brain is thinking, which involves language, logic, calculation, analysis, music, fine arts, imagination, creation and so on. Metaphorical thinking is an important way of thinking with language, whose process ought to be run under the framework of the cognition in the brain. Metaphor is a way of thinking as well as a form of language. Therefore, metaphorical thinking has its unique forms, characteristics and functions. The study for metaphors has a long history. However, such study was once restricted within the field of rhetoric research over a long period. Since the 1980s, the foreign researchers have successively put forward a series of theories concerning metaphorical cognition, and thus expanded its scope from linguistics into the whole cognitive science whose purpose is to reveal the law of man’s thinking. Meanwhile, the rapid advance of the means of neuroscience enables us to observe the neuro-mechanism of language cognition on line via electrophysiological methods. Recently, resorting to the constantly updated techniques of neural imaging and analysis, some western scholars have attempted to explore the neuro-mechanism of metaphorical cognition by means of ERP (Event-related Potential) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) in order to profoundly probe into the conventional issue of the relationship between language and thought. Following their steps, the author has also tried to do the research on metaphorical cognition by means of electrophysiology. But different from them, this research has focused on Chinese metaphorical cognition via ERP experiment. Therefore, the ERP experiment has been conducted with some Chinese metaphors and control literal sentences. 20 native Chinese undergraduates majoring science as subjects were asked to perform the experiment. Their behavioral data and ERP data were recorded on line and analyzed off line. The results have been discussed to offer the explanation for the unique dynamic neuro-mechanism of the Chinese metaphorical cognition. On the basis of the existing theories of metaphorical cognition and from the perspective of brain information processing, the dissertation tries to verify metaphorical cognitive theories by ERP experimental results and to do research on Chinese metaphorical cognition in the framework of the linguistic cognition of the brain.