Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production

Abstract

The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well-investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually-presented sentence fragments (e.g., ‘You are at the sea and you see a ...’) with spoken nouns (e.g., ‘dolphin’, ‘palm tree’). The words were presented consecutively in an ascending or descending direction, starting from the center of the screen. These physical spatial cues did not influence lexical choices. However, the produced nouns met the spatial characteristics of the broader sentence contexts such that the typical spatial locations of the produced noun referents were predicted by the location of the situations described by the sentence fragments (i.e., upper or lower sphere). By including distributional semantic similarity measures derived from computing cosine values between sentence nouns and produced nouns using a web-based text corpus, we show that the meaning dimension of ‘location in space’ guides lexical selection during speaking. We discuss the relation of this spatial meaning dimension to accounts of experientially grounded and usage-based theories of language processing and their combination in hybrid approaches. In doing so, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the many facets of meaning processing during language production and their impact on the words we select to express verbal messages.

Embodied language production: sensorimotor activations and interoceptive sensibility influence which words we choose when speaking

“…Sentence Stimuli. 42 German sentence fragments from Vogt et al (2022) were presented, each describing a setting like 'Du bist am Meer und siehst…' (English: 'You are at the sea and you see…'). Sentences consisted of six words, starting with the personal pronoun 'du' (English: 'you') followed by a verb, a place description and ending with the phrase 'und siehst' (English: 'and you see'), indicating that participants should complete the sentence with a suitable noun phrase (noun plus determiner).…”

“…Sentences consisted of six words, starting with the personal pronoun 'du' (English: 'you') followed by a verb, a place description and ending with the phrase 'und siehst' (English: 'and you see'), indicating that participants should complete the sentence with a suitable noun phrase (noun plus determiner). The nouns at the fourth position of the stimulus sentences were rated beforehand according to their spatial location (9-point Likert scale ranging from down over central to up, see Vogt et al, 2022) to ensure that the sentence fragments described situations spanning a wide range of spatial locations on the vertical axis.…”

“…Still, it remains a hitherto unanswered question whether embodiment in the form of (re)activations of experientially grounded meaning is relevant for language production (Vinson et al, 2014;Vogt et al, 2022). Here we test whether embodied meaning directly affects which words we chose when we plan to speak.…”

“…In addition, we aimed at finding out whether interindividual differences in interoceptive sensibility, the general tendency to perceive body processes, moderate the impact of the head posture on lexical selection. We adopted a paradigm by Vogt et al (2022) in which participants completed non-constraining sentence fragments like 'You are in the forest and you see…' or 'You are in the mountains and you see…' with suitable nouns of their choice.…”

“…Furthermore, we expected that the relation between head movement and location of the produced sentence ending should be enhanced with higher individual tendencies to attend to the bodily states as indicated by interoceptive sensibility scores. Finally, as in the previous study by Vogt et al (2022) we also included distributional semantic similarity measures between the nouns in the sentences and the produced nouns, expecting to replicate the observation that the spatial properties of the words in the sentence fragments influence the spatial properties of the produced words independent of semantic associations.…”