The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

Abstract

The present study adopted the printed-word visual world paradigm to investigate the salience effect on Chinese pun comprehension. In such an experiment, participants listen to a spoken sentence while looking at a visual display of four printed words (including a semantic competitor, a phonological competitor, and two unrelated distractors). Previous studies based on alphabetic languages have found robust phonological effects (participants fixated more at phonological competitors than distractors during the unfolding of the spoken target words), while controversy remains regarding the existence of a similar semantic effect. A recent Chinese study reported reliable semantic effects in two experiments using this paradigm, suggesting that Chinese participants could actively map the semantic input from the auditory modality with the semantic information retrieved from printed words. In light of their study, we designed an experiment with two conditions: a replication condition to test the validity of using the printed-word world paradigm in Chinese semantic research, and a pun condition to assess the role played by salience during pun comprehension. Indeed, global analyses have revealed robust semantic effects in both experimental conditions, where participants were found more attracted to the semantic competitors than to the distractors with the emergence of target words. More importantly, the local analyses from the pun condition have shown that the participants were more attracted to the semantic competitors related to the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun than to those related to the less salient meanings within 200 ms after target word offset. This finding suggests that the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun is activated and assessed faster than its less salient counterpart. The initial advantage observed in the present study is consistent with the prediction of the graded salience hypothesis rather than the direct access model.

Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns

“…The salience effect during pun comprehension was further supported by many following studies using different paradigms, such as behavioral study ( Mchugh and Buchanan, 2016 ; Koleva et al, 2019 ) and eye-tracking study ( Zheng et al, 2020 ). For example, Zheng et al (2020) used a visual world paradigm to investigate how the two meanings of the pun word are accessed temporally.…”

“…The salience effect during pun comprehension was further supported by many following studies using different paradigms, such as behavioral study ( Mchugh and Buchanan, 2016 ; Koleva et al, 2019 ) and eye-tracking study ( Zheng et al, 2020 ). For example, Zheng et al (2020) used a visual world paradigm to investigate how the two meanings of the pun word are accessed temporally. In their experiment, the participants listened to Chinese homograph and homophone puns while looking at a visual display of four printed words: a phonological competitor (words sharing the first syllable with the pun word), two semantic competitors (words related to both meanings of the pun word), and an unrelated control.…”

“…As a result, most current investigations have focused on the meaning-access process during pun comprehension. Although different terms may have been used, one consistent finding in recent pun research is the so-called salience effect; namely, the salient meaning of a pun word is accessed faster than the other related but less salient meaning (e.g., Zheng et al, 2020 ), in line with the graded salience hypothesis ( Giora, 1997 ). This theory adopts a modular view of linguistic processing ( Fodor, 1983 ).…”

“…The current study then further examines the salience effect in reading homophone puns. In particular, we answer the question: which of the homophone-pair to present is more likely to result in a pun interpretation ( Zheng et al, 2020 )? According to the graded salience hypothesis, the salient meaning associated with a linguistic form or sound is more recoverable even when the context is not in its favor.…”

“…Consequently, readers can only acquire one meaning through the presented homophone while relying heavily on the shared phonology and context for the other meaning. Although some homophone puns were used in the study of Zheng et al (2020) , their materials were presented to the participants via recordings; hence the differences between the two types of puns were largely masked in that the participants had to rely on phonological information for both types of puns.…”