Abstract Many ERP studies have highlighted processing difficulty for animacy violation in language, more so than non-violated sentences. However, all of these findings were for non-figurative language, and studies have rarely looked at the figurative language, such as metaphors involving animacy violation, which could be integrated to make novel and acceptable meaning. The present study aimed at assessing the role of animacy in metaphorical comprehension of Mandarin Chinese. ERPs were recorded as healthy participants read metaphor or literal sentences with animate or inanimate actors as sentence-initial noun, while the target words were measured at the verb and the second argument (object) of the sentences with subject-verb-object (SVO) structure. As expected, the animacy violations elicited a significant N400 effect by the target verb in the metaphor with inanimate initial-nouns. At the objects, the N400 amplitudes associated with metaphors were not regulated by animacy. Subsequently, the analysis revealed a significant difference in the P600 amplitudes between inanimate and animate metaphorical conditions. The metaphors with inanimate actor elicited an attenuated P600 as compared with the animate counterparts and converged to the same level as literal sentences, reflecting the less effortful metaphor-relevant mapping process. These results suggest that animacy violation may facilitate the integration of the reanalysis stage for metaphorical comprehension, and the conflict strength (animacy violation vs. no animacy violation) modulates the time course of metaphor processing in Mandarin Chinese. The present study yields new insights into the role of animacy in the online linguistic comprehension.

中文翻译：

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动画在普通话隐喻加工中的作用：事件相关电位（ERP）研究

摘要 许多 ERP 研究都强调了语言中违反生命力的处理难度，比未违反的句子更难。然而，所有这些发现都是针对非比喻性语言的，研究很少关注比喻性语言，例如涉及生命侵犯的隐喻，可以将其整合以产生新颖且可接受的含义。本研究旨在评估生机勃勃在汉语普通话隐喻理解中的作用。ERPs 被记录为健康参与者阅读隐喻或文字句子，以有生命或无生命的演员作为句首名词，而目标词是在动词和主谓宾 (SVO) 句子的第二个参数（宾语）上测量的结构体。正如预期的那样，有生命的初始名词隐喻中的目标动词引发了显着的 N400 效应。在物体上，与隐喻相关的 N400 振幅不受生命力的调节。随后，分析揭示了无生命和有生命隐喻条件之间 P600 振幅的显着差异。与有生命的对应物相比，具有无生命演员的隐喻引出一个衰减的 P600，并收敛到与文字句子相同的水平，反映了较不费力的隐喻相关映射过程。这些结果表明，生气可能促进隐喻理解的再分析阶段的整合，并且冲突强度（生气与没有生气）调节了汉语普通话隐喻加工的时间进程。