关键词: 熟语; 表征; 加工; 神经认知研究

Abstract:

Chinese idioms which are abundant, time honored, and widely used, show Chinese speakers’ peculiarity of thought. Studies of Chinese idioms disclose cognitive processes during language comprehension. Professor Zhang Hui’s new book Idiom Representation and Processing: A Neurocognitive Approach is a result of his fifteen years’ research on Chinese idioms. The book has 287 pages, which is divided into 15 chapters, applying event-related potential (ERP) technique to the study on main sub-categories of Chinese idioms, such as phrases, proverbs, xiehouyu and emerging constructions. The book tries to prove viewpoints among linguistic theories and empirical studies of neurolinguistics by combining them with each other, provide convincing evidences with theoretical construction of linguistics, especially to that of cognitive linguistic theories, enrich our understanding of language processing and comprehension in the brain, and offer an important basis to the construction of linguistic comprehension model of psycholinguistics. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the relation between linguistic theories and neuroscientific methods is complicated in that epistemological and methodological questions remain to be tackled. Thus a cohesive correlation between them is in urgent need. The book integrates linguistic and brain views by reporting brand new scientific discoveries and building feasible theoretical models, which is both academically and practically valuable to relevant studies. The review introduces contents and main idea of the book and gives brief comments and expectations.

Keywords: idioms; representation; processing; neurocognitive studies