Immediate sensorimotor grounding of novel concepts learned from language alone

Abstract

Note: This is the author's preprint version of the article (date: 17. 08. 2020). The final article is accepted for publication in the Journal of Memory and Language. Theories of grounded cognition postulate that concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience. But how can that be for concepts like Atlantis for which we do not have that experience? We claim that such concepts obtain their sensorimotor grounding indirectly, via already-known concepts used to describe them. Participants learned novel words referring to up or down concepts (mende = enhanced head or mende = bionic foot). In a first experiment, participants then judged the sensibility of sentences implying up or down actions (e.g., "You scratch your bionic foot") by performing up or down hand movements. Reactions were faster when the hand movement matched the direction of the implied movement. In the second experiment, we observed the same congruency effect for sentences like, "You scratch your mende", whose implied direction depended entirely on the learning phase. This offers a perspective on how concepts learned without direct experience can nonetheless be grounded in sensorimotor experience.

Building semantic memory from embodied and distributional language experience

“…The findings reviewed above are consistent with the suggestion that distributional models that take only language data as input may be adequate for broadly capturing semantic similarity, and emerging evidence suggests that novel words may, to some degree, acquire embodied representations by virtue of the embodied properties of the contexts in which they appear (Günther et al, 2020;Snefjella et al, 2020; see also Snefjella & Kuperman, 2016). An interesting open question is whether embodied experience alone (e.g., Öttl et al, 2017) also facilitates category learning, or whether language is necessary for carving categorical boundaries into our experience (for review, see Lupyan, 2012).…”

“…As described above, it has been proposed that we can learn embodied meanings of words through acquired embodiment (e.g., Hoffman et al, 2018), whereby sensory-perceptual properties can be attributed to, for example, more abstract concepts by virtue of them sharing linguistic contexts with concrete concepts, (e.g., a relatively abstract concept like death might become associated with black via associations with funeral). And indeed, novel words can acquire embodied-like representations from purely linguistic experience (Günther et al, 2020). Specifically, after novel words were learned in contexts implying upwards or downwards movements, action-congruency effects were found if participants had to access word meaning.…”

“…The experimental work described in this section suggests that distributional linguistic information is parasitic on perceptual data-language structure comes to reflect our embodied experiences. On the converse, embodiment can, to some degree, emerge solely as a result of distributional associations (Günther et al, 2020; but see Günther et al, 2018). It is clear that there are non-trivial interdependencies between distributional linguistic information and embodied-perceptual information (see also Andrews et al, 2014).…”

“…Cross-disciplinary approaches must be a continuing point of emphasis for further progress on these issues. Experimental approaches must investigate how distributional and embodied information interact in learning and representation, and what type of learning is necessary for embodied-like representations to emerge (e.g., Öttl et al, 2017;Günther et al, 2020). Neural investigations of this may be particularly important: given that embodied theories hold that sensory-perceptual experience gives rise to concept representation in modality-specific neural systems, one might ask: is there a mechanism by which linguistic context-derived representations can come to be encoded in sensorimotor cortex?…”

Spatial and Motor Aspects in the “Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect”

“…Fernandino et al (2013) studied the ACE in patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, a disorder in the functioning of the motor system, and found that such patients were slower to understand sentences that describe an action than healthy subjects. Günther et al (2020) showed that an effect similar to the ACE occurred also with novel concepts describing actions, which had been grounded in sensorimotor experience.…”