There is increasing evidence from response time experiments that language statistics and perceptual simulations both play a role in conceptual processing. In an EEG experiment we compared neural activity in cortical regions commonly associated with linguistic processing and visual perceptual processing to determine to what extent symbolic and embodied accounts of cognition applied. Participants were asked to determine the semantic relationship of word pairs (e.g., sky – ground) or to determine their iconic relationship (i.e., if the presentation of the pair matched their expected physical relationship). A linguistic bias was found toward the semantic judgment task and a perceptual bias was found toward the iconicity judgment task. More importantly, conceptual processing involved activation in brain regions associated with both linguistic and perceptual processes. When comparing the relative activation of linguistic cortical regions with perceptual cortical regions, the effect sizes for linguistic cortical regions were larger than those for the perceptual cortical regions early in a trial with the reverse being true later in a trial. These results map upon findings from other experimental literature and provide further evidence that processing of concept words relies both on language statistics and on perceptual simulations, whereby linguistic processes precede perceptual simulation processes.

No abstract

The spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has shown that parity judgments with participants' left hands yield faster response times (RTs) for smaller numbers than for larger numbers, with the opposite result for right-hand responses. These findings have been explained by participants perceptually simulating magnitude on a mental number line. In three RT experiments, we showed that the SNARC effect can also be explained by language statistics. Participants made parity judgments of number words (Exp. 1) and Arabic numerals (Exp. 2). Linguistic frequencies of the number words and numbers mirrored the SNARC effect, explaining aspects of processing that a perceptual simulation account could not. In Experiment 3, we investigated whether high- and low-frequency nonnumerical words would also elicit a SNARC-like effect. Again, RTs were faster for high-frequency words for left-hand responses, with the opposite result for right-hand responses. These results demonstrate that what has only been attributed to perceptual simulation should also be attributed to language statistics.

Knowledge regarding social information is commonly believed to be derived from sources such as formal relationships and interviews and can be plotted as complex networks. We explored whether social networks can also be extracted through other means by using language statistics. In three computational studies we computed first-order and higher-order (latent semantic analysis) co-occurrences of story characters in three novels. These statistical linguistic frequencies entered in a multidimensional scaling analysis yielded a two-dimensional solution that correlated with the twodimensional networks of characters generated by experts. An experimental study in which participants were asked to estimate social networks showed that human estimates are similar to computational estimates. These results demonstrated that language statistics based on texts can be used to generate social networks.

Research in cognitive linguistics has emphasized the role of embodi ment in metaphor comprehension, with experimental research showing acti vation of perceptual simulations when processing metaphors. Recent research in conceptual processing has demonstrated that findings attributed to em bodied cognition can be explained through language statistics. The current study in vestigates whether language statistics explain processing of primary metaphors and whether this effect is modified by the gender of the participant. Participants saw word pairs with valence (Experiment 1: good-bad), authority (Experiment 2: doctor-patient), temperature (Experiment 3: hot-cold), or gender (Experiment 4: male-female) connotations. The pairs were presented in either a vertical config uration (X above Y or Y above X) matching the primary metaphors (e.g., HAPPY IS UP, CONTROL IS UP) or a horizontal configuration (X left of Y or Y left of X) not matching the primary metaphors. Even though previous research has argued that primary metaphor processing can best be explained by an embodied cognition account, results demonstrate that statistical linguistic frequencies also explain the response times of the stimulus pairs both in vertical and horizontal configura tions, because language has encoded embodied relations. In addition, the effect of the statistical linguistic frequencies was modified by participant gender, with female participants being more sensitive to statistical linguistic context than male participants.