hide
Free keywords:
Embodied cognition; Language comprehension; Simulation; Action planning; Action effects
Abstract:
Embodied approaches to language comprehension suggest that we understand sentences by
using our perception and action systems for simulating their contents. In line with this
assumption, the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) shows that sensibility judgments
for sentences are faster when the direction of the described action matches the direction of
the response movement.
The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether this compatibility is effective between
sentence direction and movement direction or between sentence direction and the direction
of the movement effect. To this end, movements were dissociated from their effects in
several experiments. Participants indicated whether sentences describing transfer actions
toward or away from the body are sensible or not by producing a movement effect on a
screen at a location near the body or far from the body. These movement effects were
achieved by moving the hand from a middle button to a near or far button, i.e., toward the
body or away from the body. In one condition, a movement effect resulted from pressing the
button whose location corresponded with the location of the effect. Crucially for the above
research question, there was another condition in which an action effect resulted from
pressing the button at the opposite location.
Since in the first series of experiments, the ACE turned out to be unreliable and in part
seemed to be reversed, it was difficult to address the initial question. Therefore, a second
series of experiments additionally investigated the role of timing between response
preparation and sentence comprehension as a potential cause of the negative ACE. Results
showed a positive ACE when the same directional feature was concurrently activated within
the two processes, leading to priming between them. A negative ACE appeared when the
directional feature was already bound into the sentence representation and thus was less
accessible when needed for response preparation. In both cases, the ACE was related to the
movement effect. These results suggest that the ACE occurs on the higher level of cognitive
representations referring to distal information.
