Metaphors in Chinese two-character expression: An ERP study

Abstract

The processing of two-character lexicons in Chinese of metaphors was examined using event related potentials (ERPs). The main findings of this study is that, first, as Chinese writing system belongs to the ideogram, that Chinese characters symbolizing the idea(meaning) of a thing without indicating the sound used to say it, the metaphor effect revealed by ERPs not only shows in the sentence level of “A is B” form, but also shows in two-character lexicons. Second, while both conventional metaphor and literal lexicon expressions were rated similarly as familiar and interpretable, the ERP results showed that the conventional metaphors required a short burst of additional processing effort when compared with literal sentences. Moreover, this study supported the standard pragmatic model or hierarchical model. The metaphor meaning of the words would not be accessed directly. It takes more effort to understand the metaphor meaning of the target word compared with the literal meaning, even if they are with the same familiarity.