The Embodied Effect in the Comprehension of Chinese Action-Verb Metaphors

Embodied cognition holds that one's body, actions, perceptions, and situations are integrated into the cognitive process and emphasizes the fact that sensorimotor systems play a role in language comprehension. Previous studies verified the embodied effect in literal language processing but few of them paid attention to metaphors in embodied cognition. The present study aims to explore the embodied effect in the comprehension of Chinese action-verb metaphor. Participants watched a video containing icons and corresponding actions to learn the relationship between them and how to perform these actions in the learning phase and in the test phase, a series of action-describing metaphor phrases were presented to participants with either the icons as primes or no prime at all. The results confirmed the embodied effect as the reaction times (RTs) were significantly shorter when action prime matched the action-verb in the following action-verb metaphor than that of no-prime condition, which are consistent with the facilitation observed in previous relevant studies in embodied cognition. In conclusion, this study verified the embodied effect in the comprehension of Chinese action-verb metaphor, offering further support to embodied cognition and providing a new interpretation for the metaphoric meaning construction of Chinese action-verbs.