Semantic Representation of Language Flashcards
Why do embodied theories have difficulties explaining abstract language representations.
Abstract concepts are not directly mapped to our five senses.
What is the evidence that provides support for the causal role of embodied experience representing language meaning?
Injecting Botox to the face interferes with the understanding of ‘smile’
Describe the Chinese Room Problem.
- Has a dictionary and need to decide the meaning if chinese characters.
- It appears that they understand the language, but this isn’t the case.
- Know the meaning when given meaningful images to show meaning
What is an Amodal symbol?
A symbol that is not tied to one or more perceptual systems.
Describe the Amodal symbol of language representation.
semantic representations can be abstract symbols.
- mental representation must be a central language processing unit
- nothing to do with perception and action
Describe Embodied cognition.
The idea that the body (its movement, or eternal state) can be used in cognition (e.g. to understand words, or social situations).
- dependent on bodily experience
- mental representation must be a distributed semantic system
- language processing interacts with ongoing perception and action.
What is the symbol grounding problem (Harrad, 1990) ?
- The problem of defining concepts without assuming some preexisting knowledge.
- Symbols has no constraints so itself has no meaning
- Something can only be meaningful if it has constraints
What is the evidence for the Embodied theory of language representation?
Stanfield & Zwaan, (2001)
- Sentence Picture verification task
- RT to answering is this a pencil when in different orientations
- RT was different with different orientations
Glenberg & Kaschak 2002
- Sentence and action compatibility task
- Compared comprehension of sentences, then Ps had to say if sentence made sense.
- RT were different
- Amodal model would expect to see similar reaction times
What is the neuro-scientific evidence for language representation?
- Understanding of different action in language is topographically organised. = discredits amodal system theory
- when you read different action words the same areas of the motor cortex are activated = distributed semantic system
Affected in Parkinson’s
What did Buccino et al (2005) find when investigating language representation?
Listening vs. Body Movements
- TMS to investigate if muscular activity is differentially engaged.
- motor evoked potentials (MEPs) measured.
- When you listen to hand related activity the muscles of the hand are more activated.
What did Speer et al (2009) find when investigating language representation?
Listening vs. Multimodal Experiences
- Used ecologically valid stimuli (short narrative instead of single words)
- There is clearly a distributed system for language. Different parts of the system deal with different kinds of information.
What have neuropsychological patient studies shown about language representations?
- Parkinson’s patients suffer specific impairments in the motor system.
- They have difficulties in understanding actions in language, thus providing causal evidence for embodied cognitive theory.
Fernandino et al., 2013 - asked if sentences made sense.
- actions vs non action sentence. & compared different type of actions.
- parkinsons = harder to understand literal, metaphoric actions.
What are the different types of Actions?
- Literal Action
- Metaphoric Action
- Idiomatic Action
- Abstract Verb