Abstract:
In cognitive science, the question of how humans understand the meaning of language has been intrinsically linked to investigating the representational format of cognitive processes underlying this unique human ability. Traditional views hypothesizing that language comprehension operates on an abstract amodal code have been increasingly challenged by embodied accounts favoring concrete modal representational formats. The latter ones typically propose that we establish meaning through reactivating and combining sensorimotor experiences associated with the content of utterances that are processed – a mechanism which is also referred to as mental simulation. Even though an enormous amount of studies originated from this framework, important questions are far from being answered or have barely been investigated in an adequate manner. In this cumulative dissertation, some of these open issues are tackled. This includes methodological aspects, the nature of mental simulations created in response to both isolated words and complete sentences, and the embodiment of the abstract linguistic property of sentence polarity. First of all, I introduced and evaluated a new method that can replace actual vertical response movements. This provides researchers with a web-suited and easy to implement approach to investigating word-based reactivations of spatial experiences and other types of spatial associations. In further experiments, the focus was on contributing new insights into issues that are particularly relevant in the context of assessing to what extent human language comprehension might indeed rely on creating mental simulations. A series of studies revealed that implicit location words denoting entities typically located in lower or upper space (e.g., “worm” vs. “comet”) appear to evoke spatial simulations only if the experimental task involves the sensorimotor system in an adequate manner. My research also showed that language comprehenders tend to create mental simulations of sentential meaning merely at the end of sentences – possibly as a sort of sentential wrap-up effect after amodal meaning composition has taken place. These findings might suggest that language processing is not exclusively based on mental simulations, thus supporting the idea of so-called weak views of embodiment and hybrid models of cognition that acknowledge the role of both modal and amodal representational formats. It will be one core topic of future research to examine under which boundary conditions mental simulations are created and whether these are functionally relevant for language comprehension. Finally, I conducted experiments to explore how the abstract linguistic property of sentence polarity could be represented in terms of sensorimotor experiences. The idea was that specific visual experiences related to negation or affirmation have evolved into non-verbal markers of sentence polarity carrying semantic meaning. Very first results from this promising new avenue of research indicated that this might not hold true for the so-called “not face” or red/green color cues. Since linguistic negation and affirmation regularly co-occur with various sensorimotor states induced by the use of non-verbal means of communication (e.g., head shake vs. head nod), future studies should test in a more systematic manner whether and in which language comprehension scenarios such experiences can contribute to the embodiment of sentence polarity.
Cognitive Psychology