3 Theoretical Framework..................................16
4 Research Methods..................................18
4.1 Participants.........................................18
4.2 Design and Materials...................................... 18
4.3 Pretests........................................20
5 Results............................24
6 Discussion
6.1 The Mapping Construction during Mixed Metaphor Comprehension
The first aim of the present study was to examine the existence ofbetween-source-domain mapping construction by observing the differences between mixedmetaphor comprehension and pure metaphor comprehension. The data analysis yields anon-significant result both in Chinese and English condition within-subject and within-items,showing that mixed and pure metaphors display no differences with respect to reaction time.In other words, there is no positive evidence that participants constructbetween-source-domain mappings when comprehending a mixed metaphor, namely, mixedmetaphors are not understood by means of maximizing correspondences between sourcedomains. Because if such mappings were constructed by the participants of the present study,they failed to produce the delay in response time that was observed by Glucksberg et al.[54]While it is of course problematic to extrapolate from a relative absence of an effect, themeasurements are consistent with the interpretation that people can process mixed metaphorswithout more efforts because of not running into any incompatibilities. Considering the mixedmetaphors we adopted in the present study are in a special type of metaphor interaction —conceptual complementation, mixed metaphors here are thus more likely to be comprehendedby selectively projection. In other word, in the process of understanding mixed metaphors,people do not mechanically construct the mappings between source domains as many aspossible, but take use of their social and cultural background knowledge and then combine theknowledge with the current context to partly activate the source domains information into acoherent whole, and eventually construct the overall meaning of mixed metaphors.
7 Conclusion
By conducting a behavioral experiment, the present study aims to investigate one smallaspect of metaphor processing model that bilinguals employ when they process mixedmetaphors. By comparing two conflicting hypotheses of mixed metaphor comprehension forChinese (L1) - English (L2) bilinguals, this research explored the role ofbetween-source-domain mappings in the comprehension of mixed metaphors forChinese-English bilingual. And we have drawn the conclusions as follows:
Firstly, when judging the literal truth of a “Some Xs are Ys” statement, subjects spent nomore time to make a response for the test sentence with a mixed metaphor prime compared toa pure metaphor prime. The results were both observed in Chinese group and English group,which reveals that the participants comprehended mixed metaphor without conductingbetween-source-domain mappings and probably do not run into any incompatibilities as aresult of shallow processing. Secondly, English test sentences consumed more time and wereresponded more correctly under mixed metaphors priming compared to Chinese ones, whichindicates that semantic processing requires more cognitive efforts in L2 than L1 due todifferent language proficiency, and the advantage in L1 for bilinguals may also lead to theirrich associations to attain the reasonability of test sentences resulting in a higher error rate.
Overall, the study has testified the mapping construction in the cognitive mechanism ofnative Chinese who study English as the L2 when they understand mixed metaphors. Aconclusion was drawn that in both L1 and L2, there was no mappings between sourcedomains constructed during mixed metaphors comprehending. In addition, some differenceswas also found betwee
