Embodied Cognition and Language: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (18 August 2018) | Viewed by 32866

Special Issue Editors

Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
Interests: first language acquisition; language and cognition; Hindi and Tamil linguistics; lexical semantics; morphosyntax; information structure
Faculty of Environment and Information, Keio University, Fujisawa-shi, Kanagawa 252-0882, Japan
Interests: lexical acquisition; relation between language and thought; sound symbolism
Department of Psychology and Computer Science Department, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
Interests: Cognitive and language development; combining computational modeling; cross-linguistic studies with children and adults

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This proposed Special Issue of Languages invites papers from researchers who are broadly interested in the topic of language and embodied cognition. Papers can be empirical or theoretical in nature, and may address any question related to the role of embodiment in language and cognitive processing in individuals belonging to different populations.

Increasingly, the conventional notion that language and cognitive processing involve the manipulation of amodal symbols has been challenged by claims that “the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social nature” (Lakoff 1987, p. xiv). Theories of “embodied” or “grounded” cognition differ in many ways (Bergen 2015; Soylu 2016), but generally examine the connection between bodily and cognitive states, or focus on the extent to which cognition involves the reenactment of perceptual, motor, and introspective states gained through experience (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Barsalou 2008). From this perspective, language understanding involves activating sensorimotor information associated with the concepts underlying concrete expressions, as well as abstract expressions (Fernandino et al. 2015), whose meanings are understood via metaphoric extension from concrete conceptual domains (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Gibbs 2006). For instance, in a study by Glenberg and Kaschak (2002), participants judged whether sentences were sensible by making a movement towards or away from their bodies. Participants had more difficulty responding to sentences that implied action in a particular direction (e.g., “close the door” implying movement away from the body) that was opposite to the direction of their own movement (e.g., towards the body) compared to sentences implying a direction consistent with the bodily action (e.g., “open the door”). Mental simulation has also been proposed to influence the comprehension of figurative uses of motion verbs. For instance, reading a story involving fast travel, short distances, or easy terrains reduced participants’ response times in making a decision about a fictive motion sentence (e.g., “the road runs along the coast”) versus a non-fictive motion sentence (e.g., “the road is in the valley”) (Matlock 2004).

A substantial body of work from behavioral and neuroimaging studies has investigated the role of perceptual, emotional, or motor information on language and other higher-level cognitive processes (Bergen 2012; Galetzka 2017). The findings from prior research provide support for the claim that sensorimotor information plays a role in language and conceptual processing. However, there are many open questions about how our bodily interactions with, and perceptions of, the world impact our mind. For instance, what is the nature of the role of modality-specific representations in conceptual processing? Some researchers take the strong position that sensorimotor information is constitutive of most, if not all, conceptual representations, whereas others allow for the possibility of modality-specific as well as amodal representations of concepts, a position that may not be distinct from "disembodied" approaches to cognition (Mahon 2015). Another important issue needing to be addressed that is relevant to the embodied/disembodied cognition approach is linguistic diversity. The ways in which languages lexicalize aspects of our experience of the world differ widely. If all aspects of language are grounded to body, how should we account for such diversity in language? Are meanings that are universally coded in words also more embodied? There has been relatively little work investigating populations other than monolingual speakers of Indo-European languages; further research is also required to investigate how embodied cognition develops in child and adult learners of different languages, and the implications of the embodied approach for assessing and treating individuals with language disorders (see discussions in Bergen and Feldman 2008; Wellsby and Pexman 2014; Adams 2016; Cardona 2017). The proposed volume will address this research gap by inviting contributions from researchers working in different languages, as well as different populations, including children, bilinguals and second language learners, and atypically-developing individuals.

Abstract submissions, due 30 March 2018, will be solicited from researchers in psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and theoretical, corpus, and computational linguistics who investigate the interface between language and cognition. Completed manuscripts will be due by 15 July 2018. All papers will undergo peer review and will be published immediately upon acceptance. No article processing costs will be imposed on papers submitted in 2018.

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license which allows free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in Languages. The published material can be freely re-used provided that proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given. Authors can also post a PDF of their paper immediately after publication. The manuscripts submitted to this Special Issue might be eligible for the 2018 Languages Best Paper Award.

References

  • Adams, Ashley M. 2016. How Language Is Embodied in Bilinguals and Children with Specific Language Impairment. Frontiers in Psychology 7:1209.
  • Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2008. Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59: 617–45.
  • Bergen, Benjamin K. 2012. Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books.
  • Bergen, Benjamin K. 2015. Embodiment, simulation, and meaning. In The Routledge Handbook of Semantics. Edited by Nick Riemer. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 142–57.
  • Bergen, Benjamin K., and Feldman, Jerome A. 2008. Embodied Concept Learning. In Handbook of Cognitive Science: An Embodied Approach. Edited by Paco Calvo and Toni Gomila. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 313–32.
  • Cardona, Juan F. 2017. Embodied Cognition: A Challenging Road for Clinical Neuropsychology. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 9: 1–5.
  • Fernandino, Leonardo, Jeffrey R. Binder, Rutvik H. Desai, Suzanne L. Pendl, Colin J. Humphries, William L. Gross, Lisa L. Conant, and Mark S. Seidenberg. Concept Representation Reflects Multimodal Abstraction: A Framework for Embodied Semantics. Cerebral Cortex 26: 2018–34.
  • Galetzka, Cedric. 2017. The Story So Far: How Embodied Cognition Advances Our Understanding of Meaning-Making. Frontiers in Psychology 8: 1315.
  • Gibbs Raymond W. JR. Metaphor Interpretation as Embodied Simulation. Mind & Language 21: 434–58.
  • Glenberg, Arthur M., and Michael P. Kaschak. 2002. Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9: 558–65.
  • Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Lakoff, George., and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books.
  • Mahon, Bradford Z. The burden of embodied cognition. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 69: 172–78.
  • Matlock, Teenie. 2004. Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory & Cognition 32: 1389–1400.
  • Soylu, Firat. 2016. An embodied approach to understanding: Making sense of the world through simulated bodily activity. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1914.
  • Wellsby, Michele, and Penny M. Pexman. 2014. Developing embodied cognition: insights from children’s concepts and language processing. Frontiers in Psychology 5: 506.
Dr. Bhuvana Narasimhan
Prof. Dr. Mutsumi Imai
Dr. Eliana Colunga

Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • Atypically-developing Individuals
  • Bilingualism
  • Cognitive Processing
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Corpus Linguistics
  • Embodied Cognition
  • Experimental Psycholinguistics
  • First and Second Language Learning
  • Grounded Cognition
  • Language Understanding
  • Linguistic Diversity
  • Theoretical Linguistics

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 2694 KiB  
Article
Gaze as a Window to the Process of Novel Adjective Mapping
by Hanako Yoshida, Aakash Patel and Joseph Burling
Languages 2019, 4(2), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4020033 - 03 Jun 2019
Viewed by 2411
Abstract
This study evaluated two explanations for how learning of novel adjectives is facilitated when all the objects are from the same category (e.g., exemplar and testing objects are all CUPS) and the object category is a known to the children. One explanation (the [...] Read more.
This study evaluated two explanations for how learning of novel adjectives is facilitated when all the objects are from the same category (e.g., exemplar and testing objects are all CUPS) and the object category is a known to the children. One explanation (the category knowledge account) focuses on early knowledge of syntax–meaning correspondence, and another (the attentional account) focuses on the role of repeated perceptual properties. The first account presumes implicit understanding that all the objects belong to the same category, and the second account presumes only that redundant perceptual experiences minimize distraction from irrelevant features and thus guide children’s attention directly to the correct item. The present study tests the two accounts by documenting moment-to-moment attention allocation (e.g., looking at experimenter’s face, exemplar object, target object) during a novel adjective learning task with 50 3-year-olds. The results suggest that children’s attention was guided directly to the correct item during the adjective mapping and that such direct attention allocation to the correct item predicted children’s adjective mapping performance. Results are discussed in relation to their implication for children’s active looking as the determinant of process for mapping new words to their meanings. Full article
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13 pages, 1460 KiB  
Article
Sound Symbolism Facilitates Long-Term Retention of the Semantic Representation of Novel Verbs in Three-Year-Olds
by Katerina Kantartzis, Mutsumi Imai, Danielle Evans and Sotaro Kita
Languages 2019, 4(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4020021 - 28 Mar 2019
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 4349
Abstract
Previous research has shown that sound symbolism facilitates action label learning when the test trial used to assess learning immediately followed the training trial in which the (novel) verb was taught. The current study investigated whether sound symbolism benefits verb learning in the [...] Read more.
Previous research has shown that sound symbolism facilitates action label learning when the test trial used to assess learning immediately followed the training trial in which the (novel) verb was taught. The current study investigated whether sound symbolism benefits verb learning in the long term. Forty-nine children were taught either sound-symbolically matching or mismatching pairs made up of a novel verb and an action video. The following day, the children were asked whether a verb can be used for a scene shown in a video. They were tested with four videos for each word they had been taught. The four videos differed as to whether they contained the same or different actions and actors as in the training video: (1) same-action, same-actor; (2) same-action, different-actor; (3) different-action, same-actor; and (4) different-action, different-actor. The results showed that sound symbolism significantly improved the childrens’ ability to encode the semantic representation of the novel verb and correctly generalise it to a new event the following day. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that children were generalising to the “same-action, different-actor” video because they did not recognize the actor change due to the memory decay. Nineteen children were presented with the stimulus videos that had also been shown to children in the sound symbolic match condition in Experiment 1, but this time the videos were not labeled. In the test session the following day, the experimenter tested the children’s recognition memory for the videos. The results indicated that the children could detect the actor change from the original training video a day later. The results of the main experiment and the control experiment support the idea that a motivated (iconic) link between form and meaning facilitates the symbolic development in children. The current study, along with recent related studies, provided further evidence for an iconic advantage in symbol development in the domain of verb learning. A motivated form-meaning relationship can help children learn new words and store them long term in the mental lexicon. Full article
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10 pages, 299 KiB  
Article
Actions as a Basis for Online Embodied Concepts
by Holly Keily
Languages 2019, 4(1), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010016 - 07 Mar 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2207
Abstract
In co-speech gesture research, embodied cognition implies that concepts are associated with haptic and motor information that provides a framework for a gestural plan. When speakers access concepts, embodied action images are automatically activated. This study considers situations in which speakers need to [...] Read more.
In co-speech gesture research, embodied cognition implies that concepts are associated with haptic and motor information that provides a framework for a gestural plan. When speakers access concepts, embodied action images are automatically activated. This study considers situations in which speakers need to create online concepts of events to investigate the aspect of the event that forms the basis of a new concept. Speakers watched short event video clips with familiar or unfamiliar attributes. They described those clips to partners who had to perform a matching task. Experimental results show that speakers gestured less and produced shorter gestures when relaying longer event descriptions. Speakers were more likely to produce gesture when some aspect of the event was unfamiliar, and they were most sensitive to the familiarity of the event’s main action. Further, when speakers did gesture, they were most likely to gesture to represent the action of the event over the physical attributes of it (the instrument used to enact or the object acted upon). These findings suggest that in creating an embodied concept for something unfamiliar, the motion of the event acts as a basis for their online embodied representation of the concept. Full article
32 pages, 9181 KiB  
Article
Immersive Virtual Reality as an Effective Tool for Second Language Vocabulary Learning
by Jennifer Legault, Jiayan Zhao, Ying-An Chi, Weitao Chen, Alexander Klippel and Ping Li
Languages 2019, 4(1), 13; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010013 - 18 Feb 2019
Cited by 91 | Viewed by 15702
Abstract
Learning a second language (L2) presents a significant challenge to many people in adulthood. Platforms for effective L2 instruction have been developed in both academia and the industry. While real-life (RL) immersion is often lauded as a particularly effective L2 learning platform, little [...] Read more.
Learning a second language (L2) presents a significant challenge to many people in adulthood. Platforms for effective L2 instruction have been developed in both academia and the industry. While real-life (RL) immersion is often lauded as a particularly effective L2 learning platform, little is known about the features of immersive contexts that contribute to the L2 learning process. Immersive virtual reality (iVR) offers a flexible platform to simulate an RL immersive learning situation, while allowing the researcher to have tight experimental control for stimulus delivery and learner interaction with the environment. Using a mixed counterbalanced design, the current study examines individual differences in L2 performance during learning of 60 Mandarin Chinese words across two learning sessions, with each participant learning 30 words in iVR and 30 words via word–word (WW) paired association. Behavioral performance was collected immediately after L2 learning via an alternative forced-choice recognition task. Our results indicate a main effect of L2 learning context, such that accuracy on trials learned via iVR was significantly higher as compared to trials learned in the WW condition. These effects are reflected especially in the differential effects of learning contexts, in that less successful learners show a significant benefit of iVR instruction as compared to WW, whereas successful learners do not show a significant benefit of either learning condition. Our findings have broad implications for L2 education, particularly for those who struggle in learning an L2. Full article
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31 pages, 5450 KiB  
Article
Learning Labels for Objects: Does Degree of Sensorimotor Experience Matter?
by Michele Wellsby and Penny Pexman
Languages 2019, 4(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010003 - 11 Jan 2019
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3853
Abstract
Theories of embodied cognition propose that sensorimotor experience is essential to learning, representing, and accessing conceptual information. Embodied effects have been observed in early child development and adult cognitive processing, but there has been less research examining the role of embodiment in later [...] Read more.
Theories of embodied cognition propose that sensorimotor experience is essential to learning, representing, and accessing conceptual information. Embodied effects have been observed in early child development and adult cognitive processing, but there has been less research examining the role of embodiment in later childhood. We conducted two experiments to test whether degree of sensorimotor experience modulates children’s word learning. In Experiment 1, 5-year-old children learned labels for 10 unfamiliar objects in one of six learning conditions, which varied in how much sensorimotor experience and information about the objects children received. Children’s word learning was assessed with a recognition test. Results indicated that there was no effect of learning condition on recognition accuracy, as children performed equally well in all conditions. In Experiment 2, we modified the stimuli to emphasize the sensory features of the objects; 5-year-old children learned labels for these objects in one of two learning conditions. Once again, there was no effect of learning condition on children’s recognition accuracy performance. Overall, children’s word learning was not modulated by the extent to which they had sensorimotor experience with the labelled objects. As such, the results place some limits on the role of embodiment in language learning. Full article
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14 pages, 5139 KiB  
Article
Scaffolding Embodied Access for Categorization in Interactions between a Blind Child and Her Mother
by Carolyn Rickard, Mara Strother, Barbara A. Fox and Chase Wesley Raymond
Languages 2019, 4(1), 2; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010002 - 02 Jan 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2572
Abstract
During language acquisition, sighted children have immediate and temporally stable access to the ‘gestalt’ of an object, including particular features that suggest its categorization as part of a class of objects. Blind children, however, must effectively and productively constitute the whole object from [...] Read more.
During language acquisition, sighted children have immediate and temporally stable access to the ‘gestalt’ of an object, including particular features that suggest its categorization as part of a class of objects. Blind children, however, must effectively and productively constitute the whole object from its constitutive parts in order to categorize them. While prior studies have suggested that varied experience and appropriate sensory access can contribute to this process, little attention has been given to how this is accomplished. The present study aims to address this issue by using conversation analysis to explore embodied understanding and categorization work between a 26-month-old congenitally blind child and her sighted mother as they play with various animal toys. Here we provide an analysis of a segment involving a particular toy (a cow plush), and ask two questions: (1) During play, how does Mother scaffold embodied routines for the identification of criterial information about a category, and (2) How is knowledge of varied exemplars, not directly accessible within the current activity, then made available to the child? Detailed examination of the linguistic and embodied practices employed by this mother–child dyad provides a concrete example of how non-visual modalities help scaffold the learning of categorization techniques, as well as illustrates the import that the examination of naturally occurring social interaction can have for theories of language and embodied cognition. Full article
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