Language: Embodiment Flashcards
What is the embodied view used to represent meaning?
Associating a perceptual image with a word
(seeing a dog, thinking ‘dog’)
What is the traditional view used to represent meaning?
If you want to know the meaning of a word, you’d look it up in the mental dictionary, and then the meaning of the word would be described to you in terms of other words.
What is the symbol grounding problem?
How do we relate a word, which is an abstract symbol, to something that is real?
What did Stanfield & Zwaan (2001) find in their pencil in the cup study?
When the orientation of the picture matched the mental simulation, participants were faster to respond ‘yes’.
What did Yaxley & Zwaan (2007) find about the effect of visibility on perception?
The environment in which the objects appear can also affect relevant perceptual information.
Moose representation (clean/fogged goggles).
What were the findings from the eye-tracking experiment? (Wassenburg & Zwaan, 2010) - toothbrush
Reading times in the mismatch condition were longer than reading times in the match condition in the text that indicated the orientation of the target object (e.g., in the sink)
Whereas, reading times in other regions do not differ between conditions.
What were the findings from the ERP experiment? (Coppens, Gootjes & Zwaan, 2012) - ironing board
There was a spike in the electrical activity produced by the brain when the shape of the object implied by the sentence doesn’t match the shape of the object that was previously seen.
What did fMRI results show from the reading of action words? (Hauk, Johnsrude & Pullvermuller, 2004)
There was overlap between the locations of the brain activated by reading action words and the locations of the brain involved during the movements of those body parts.
What did fMRI results show when participants read idiomatic sentences? (Raposo et al., 2009)
Brain activation was found in fronto-temporal regions, associated with language processing, but not in motor and premotor regions.
What is a criticism of fMRI data?
fMRI data is based on blood oxygenation levels in a particular brain region and levels of blood oxygenation are slow to respond to cognitive events.
What is the action-sentence compatibility effect?
Participants were faster to move their hands in the direction that was implied in the sentence.
Similar effects were also found for ‘abstract’ transactions.
Who failed to replicate action-sentence compatibility effects across 18 labs?
Morey et al. (2022)
What did Zwaan, Taylor, & de Boer (2010) find on the action-sentence compatibility effect?
Results showed action-sentence compatibility effects for sentences that described actual actions.
However, no such mismatch effects were found for intended actions.
What is the body specificity hypothesis? (Casasanto, 2009)
People with different kinds of bodies must represent language differently.
People with different bodily characteristics, who interact with their physical environments in systematically different ways, should form correspondingly different mental representations.
What is the handedness effect?
Imagining doing a task appears in the opposite side of the brain to the hand you are most dominant in.
