Syntactic patterns to the semantic processing Chinese spatial metaphors New evidence from latencies and ERPs

摘要

This study investigates whether there are syntactic patterns to the semantic processing of Chinese spatial lexemes by measuring response latencies and ERPs from ten native Chinese speakers who judged the grammaticality of spatial lexemes with alternating conceptual and semantic properties i.e. horizontal versus vertical, spatial versus temporal, in alternating morphological and syntactic conditions i.e. phrasal versus lexical, focus versus topic, among 128 sentences of equal length modified from corpus output, half of which are artificially devised to be ungrammatical by violating semantic agreement between topics and foci. A significant latency difference is found between phrasal-topics and lexical-foci, but not between conceptual-semantic properties in the same morphological-syntactic conditions. The highest N400 amplitude is elicited from temporal-phrasal-foci and a significant P600 effect is observed in phrasal-foci regardless of grammaticality. These suggest a syntactic dependency in the Chinese conceptual metaphor processing where semantic priming is activated in the syntactic patterning of cognitive representation.