本文是一篇英语语言学论文，本研究以描述动作动词与宾语冲突的动作动词隐喻为实验材料，采用运动启动研究动作动词隐喻意义的具体化效应。基于以上实验结果和讨论，可以得出以下主要结论。
1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Emerging as a philosophical concept, embodied cognition (EC) has been the mainstream of cognitive science in recent years, claiming that a close relationship is built among human mind, body, environment and situation [1-3]. According to EC, it is hypothesized that language comprehension involves mental, perceptual and motor simulations [2]. In embodied theories, one reenacts the situation encountered before and experiences the acquired bodily states again through mental simulation [1, 3-5]. Language represents thinking patterns of our minds and serves as a window to make our minds interact with the outside world. Multimodal information (e.g., information in the visual and the auditory modality) of a word is stored in the brain and will be retrieved if necessary. More specifically, language representation occurs beyond limitations of time and space. For example, a person can relate the activated embodied meaning to his/her bodily experiences in a situation. If he/she encounters similar situations described by language, he/she will simulate the past experiences in language comprehension, and in turn he/she can utilize those experiences in language production, even if the experience happened before instead of at the time of language processing.
By contrast, the amodal view (i.e., the symbolic view or the traditional view) claims that language processing refers to computations of abstract and amodal symbols based on their statistical distribution without the involvement of sensorimotor modalities and correlations between symbols and referents in the physical world are arbitrary [6, 7]. However, this view can make some trouble. For example, a foreigner abroad cannot grasp the local knowledge as much as local residents. When he/she has some difficulty in interpreting a word, the local can explain the word through other words without any body movements, however, the process may happen circularly if the foreigner encounters a new word in the explanation.
1.2 Research Objectives and Questions
The embodied effect in language comprehension has been testified by a number of previous studies, which mainly focused on literal actions [14, 17-20] without laying enough emphasis on action-verb metaphors. Action-verb metaphors refer to actions which cannot be performed with a body effector physically. In terms of the amodal view, sensorimotor systems play an epiphenomenal role in language comprehension. Conversely, sensorimotor systems play a significant role in language comprehension based on the embodied view. Therefore, it is doubt that whether processing metaphoric sense of action verbs involves the embodied simulation of real actions. Adopting motor priming paradigm, the research objectives of the present study can be summarized into two points: (1) Investigate the embodied effect in the comprehension of Chinese action-verb metaphors; (2) Compare the embodied effect in the comprehension of C
