Language Comprehenders Mentally Represent the Shapes of Objects

Abstract

We examined the prediction that people activate perceptual symbols during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences describing an animal or object in a certain location. The shape of the object or animal changed as a function of its location (e.g., eagle in the sky, eagle in a nest). However, this change was only implied by the sentences. After reading a sentence, subjects were presented with a line drawing of the object in question. They judged whether the object had been mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 1) or simply named the object (Experiment 2). In both cases, responses were faster when the pictured object's shape matched the shape implied by the sentence than when there was a mismatch. These results support the hypothesis that perceptual symbols are routinely activated in language comprehension.

Situated sentence processing: The coordinated interplay account and a neurobehavioral model

“…The consistent coordination of comprehension and attention thus directly facilitates the association of verbal interpretations with visuomotor experience, and the representations those experiences yield, as posited in the embodied accounts of Barsalou (1999b) and perhaps most notably Zwaan and colleagues (Zwaan et al, 2002;Zwaan, 2004;Zwaan & Madden, 2005). Interestingly, however, there are points where our own account and many embodied accounts appear to diverge.…”

“…Thus, even when such models include visuomotor constraints (Farmer, Anderson, & Spivey, 2007), they still shed little light on how the mechanisms of incremental sentence understanding interact with visual perceptual processes, and vice versa. Embodied accounts of language processing, while explaining the resonance that exists between language and visuomotor representations (Zwaan et al, 2002;Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002) as well as temporal aspects of the simulation of events (Claus & Kelter, 2006), have neither paid much attention to the compositional mechanisms of language comprehension and their time course (but see Glenberg & Robertson, 1999;Zwaan & Taylor, 2006) nor to the development of implementable computational models with broader linguistic coverage (see Crocker, 2005, for discussion).…”

“…Zwaan, Stanfield, and Yaxley (2002), for example, found that after reading a sentence such as The ranger saw the eagle in the sky participants were faster to judge a picture of an eagle as mentioned versus not mentioned in the sentence when the depicted shape (wings outstretched) matched the shape implied in the sentence (the eagle is in the sky) compared to when it did not match (perched). Stanfield and Zwaan (2001) observed related findings concerning object orientation, while Yaxley and Zwaan (2005) provided evidence that readers simulate even the visibility of described scenes (e.g., as foggy versus clear).…”

Event perception: A mind-brain perspective.

“…Recent theories of narrative comprehension claim that readers and listeners mentally simulate an experience based on the description provided in the text (e.g., Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Zwaan, Stanfield & Yaxley, 2002). From a researcher's point of view, narratives offer opportunities for quantification and control over some features that may be important for event segmentation, so the available data provide important insights into event understanding.…”

Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

“…Furthermore, this last set of studies revealed that words associated with vertical or horizontal space were not enough to lead to interference effects, but that the results were caused by mental imagery. Importantly, building a mental simulation can also facilitate the processing of visually congruent information (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Kaschak et al, 2005;Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). The critical difference between interference and facilitation seems to be the length of time between the presentation of the linguistic stimulus and the perceptual stimulus.…”