| 其他摘要 | Indirect reply refers to the utterance with its intented meaning conveyed implicitly in a conversational situation. Psycholinguistics theories and studies on the understanding of indirect reply have mainly focused on indirect speech and the influence of various factors, specifically the differences between indirect and direct replies and why they are different. The results in this area generally reveal the complexity of understanding indirect replies, that is, compared to direct replies, indirect replies may involve additional reasoning processes. Furthermore the indirect reply comprehension could be constrained by different contexts or clues, such as the emotion and the relation between interlocutors. How the different types of indirected replys are understand, and how the understanding processes are constrained by contextual situation, are the main concerns of the dissertation.
Based on previous literature, we can find that emotional indirect reply is different from direct reply on various levels. First, the meaning conveyed by indirect reply is different from its literal meaning, and may have some implicit emotions compared with the direct reply. Furthermore, the expression of this implicit meaning is always motivated by certain social motivations (such as maintaining face). When exploring the cognitive neural mechanism of indirect reply understanding, there exist problems in previous studies. First, previous studies did not distinguish emotional and non emotional indirect replies and separate emotional from informative meaning, but simplly compared emotional indirect replies with neutral direct replies. Second, previous studies did not distinguish indirect replies with and without certain social motivations. In particular, some emotional indirect replys convey emotional information and contain certain social motivations (such as face maintenance), while the informative indirect replies does not. Then what are the cognitive mechanisms for understanding the social motivations? The purpose of this study is to investigate the cognitive neural mechanisms of understanding emotional indirect reply, especially considering the emotion and social motivation factors.
These questions are examined in two studies. Study 1 examined the time course of implicit emotional information understanding of indirect replies under different conditions through two experiments: Experiment 1 explored the understanding of implicit emotional information under dialogue conditions. The results showed that implicit emotional information can only be obtained in the late stage, indicating that it is a relatively complex process, may require more pragmatic infreence. Experiment 2 examined the effect of the valence of emotional faces on the understanding of emotional indirect replys. It was found that emotional coherence effect plays an important role in pragmatic processing, and coherent emotional faces can promote the comprehension of indirect replies. The results of study 1 showed that the understanding of implicit emotional meaning is relatively complex, and the understanding processes can be constrained dynamically by the context.
Study 2 examined the understanding of social motivation implied in emotional indirect resplies under different conditions through two experiments: Experiment 3 investigated the time course and cognitive mechanism of social motivation (face maintenance) understanding in the condition of simple dialogue. Social motivation was manipulated by setting one negative indirect reply intended for face maintenance and another for emphasizing information. The results showed that understanding social motivation of face maintenance is a relatively complex and more difficult pragmatic process. Experiment 4 further examined the effect of social status on the understanding of social motivation, by setting interlocutors in a dialoge with equal or different social status. The results showed that social status can affect the understanding of social motivation (face maintenance). Specifically, compared with low status, high social status promoted the understanding of social motivation, indicated by relatively early processing stage, the reduction of alpha-band energy and the continuous ERP effect. And the effect of social motivation only appears in the
lower social status condition, and compared with the non contextual condition in Experiment 3, both high and low social status promoted the understanding of indirect response. Experiment 4 showed that high social status promotes the understanding of motivations, and makes the emotional indirect replies more complex. The results of study 2 showed that the understanding of social motivation (face maintenance) is a relatively complex pragmatic process
In sum, this study showed that the emotion and social motivation affect the understanding of indirect replies, which makes the processing processes more difficult and complex; and that emotional faces and social status, as contextual information, could modulate the understanding processes. |
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