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Embodied approaches to comprehension propose that understanding language entails performing mental simulations of its content. The evidence, however, is mixed. Action-sentence Compatibility Effect studies (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002) report mental simulation of motor actions during processing of motion language. But the same studies find no evidence that language comprehenders perform spatial simulations of the corresponding locations. This challenges simulation- based approaches. If locations are not represented in simulation, but are still understood, then simulation may be unnecessary for understanding. We conducted a Location-sentence Compatibility experiment, to determine whether understanders mentally simulate locations. People did indeed simulate locations, but only when sentences used progressive (and not perfect) grammatical aspect. Moreover, mental simulations of locations differed for language about concrete versus abstract events. These findings substantiate the role of mental simulation in language understanding, while highlighting the importance of the grammatical form of utterances as well as their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on two experiments that ask when and under what linguistic conditions comprehenders construct detailed shape representations of mentioned objects, and whether these can change over the course of a sentence when new information contradicts earlier expectations. We used Japanese because the verb-final word order of Japanese presented a revealing test case where information about objects can radically change with a subsequent verb. The results show that language understanders consistently generate a distinct and detailed shape for an object by integrating the semantic contributions of different sentential elements. These results first confirm that the tendency to generate specific shape information about objects that are involved in described events is not limited to English, but is also present in Japanese, a typologically and genetically distinct language. But more importantly, they shed light on the processing mechanism of object representation, showing that mental representations are initiated sentence medially, and are rapidly revised if followed by a verb that implies a change to an object shape. This work contributes to ongoing research on incremental language processing - comprehenders appear to construct extremely detailed semantic representations early in a sentence, and modify them as needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical aspect is a pervasive linguistic device that, according to linguistic analyses, allows speakers to encode different ways of construing events. For instance, the progressive ( I was writing a book) is thought to reflect increased focus on the internal details of an event, as contrasted with the perfect ( I had written a book). However, experimental evidence that speakers describing events using progressive versus non-progressive aspect are in fact thinking about the same events differently is lacking. We used co-speech gesture as a means to investigate what speakers' event representations are like when they produce progressive versus non-progressive utterances. We found that progressive event descriptions were accompanied by longer-lasting and more complex gestures, but only when participants described events originally presented to them in the progressive. This evidence suggests that people are actually construing events differently when they use different grammatical aspects, but that the aspect originally used to encode the events plays a role as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When they process sentences, language comprehenders activate perceptual and motor representations of described scenes. On the 'immersed experiencer' account, comprehenders engage motor and perceptual systems to create experiences that someone participating in the described scene would have. We tested two predictions of this view. First, the distance of mentioned objects from the protagonist of a described scene should produce perceptual correlates in mental simulations. And second, mental simulation of perceptual features should be multimodal, like actual perception of such features. In Experiment 1, we found that language about objects at different distances modulated the size of visually simulated objects. In Experiment 2, we found a similar effect for volume in the auditory modality. These experiments lend support to the view that language-driven mental simulation encodes experiencer-specific spatial details. The fact that we obtained similar simulation effects for two different modalities-audition and vision-confirms the multimodal nature of mental simulations during language understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English deictic and existential there -constructions have been analyzed as constituting a single radial category of form-meaning pairings, related through motivated links, such as metaphor (Lakoff 1987). By comparison, existentials and deictic demonstratives in French make use of two distinct radial categories. The current study analyzes the varied senses of French deictic demonstratives ( voilà ‘there is’ and voici ‘here is’) and the existential ( il y a ‘there is’). We argue that the syntactic behavior of each of their senses is best explained by the semantic and pragmatic function of that sense, in combination with constraints imposed by its relation to other senses. A cross-linguistic comparison of the deictic demonstrative and existential constructions in French and English supports this claim: despite the different historical origins of these forms in the two languages, they display a strikingly similar array of uses and formal constraints. The parallel evolution of deictics and existentials in these two languages is interpreted as a case of convergent evolution of linguistic items, much like convergent evolution in biological species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]