Affordance Derivation Facilitates the Semantic Access in Comprehending Chinese Puns

Abstract The study employed ERP technique to explore whether the affordance derivation can facilitate semantic access in comprehending Chinese puns. ERPs were measured while participants read the pun sentences containing dual meanings and made a judgement about the following probes and statements. The results showed that highly related probes in pun sentences elicited a smaller N400 and a larger LPC than moderately related probes in pun sentences. As for the comparison of sentence types, both highly and moderately related probes in pun sentences produce a smaller N400 and a larger LPC than those in control sentences. These results indicate that in the early stage of pun comprehension, semantic access to the literal meaning is easier through affordance derivation because of meaning dominance and frequency. In the late stage of integration, however, the intended meaning of puns can be facilitated and accessed through its privilege of affordance derivation activated by pun words in a pun context because of the priming context and its underlying intention. The study has discovered empirically that it is the affordance derivation, which connects the context and the dual meanings indicated by the pun words, that contributes to the different time courses and dynamic underlying neurocognitive mechanisms in comprehending puns in Chinese.