Experimental methods for simulation semantics

Abstract

. Simulation semantics and language understanding How do people understand language? Though vital to the study of language and the mind, a disproportionately small body of empirical work has historically addressed this question. Research on language understanding presumably falls under the purview of cognitive linguistics, the study of the mind and language, but cognitive linguistics has predominantly produced static, verbal models of linguistic and other conceptual representations, rather than the dynamic models of psychological processing required to explain the processes of language understanding. At the same time, empirical psycholinguistics, whose experimental methods could in principle yield profound insights into the question, has shied away from deep language understanding, preferring to stick to more easily measurable and manipulable aspects of language-principally aspects of linguistic form like syntax and phonology. However, a number of lines of research have recently emerged, which wed psycholinguistic techniques with a cognitive linguistic perspective on language knowledge and use. This work introduces a new, integrated field, which focuses on the idea that language understanding is contingent upon the understander mentally simulating, or imagining, the content of utterances. This simulation-based view of meaning grows out of theories of language and the mind in which "embodiment" plays a central role. The idea of embodiment in cognitive science (

Body part representations in verbal semantics

“…There are accounts in the literature (see, e.g., Bergen, 2008;Kaschak et al, 2005) of when to expect facilitation (as in Kaschak, 2002, andZwaan, 2001, among many others) and when to expect inhibition effects (as in Bergen, Lindsay, Matlock, & Narayanan, 2007;Estes, Verges, & Barsalou, 2008;and Richardson, Spivey, Barsalou, & McRae, 2003, among others) in behavioral research like this. Interference has the potential to be a more compelling finding than facilitation, simply because it can allow for stronger inferences about the causal role of the systems involved.…”

Escrita colaborativa de flash fiction e aprendizagem de Inglês como L2: o desenvolvimento da acurácia gramatical e densidade lexical

“…Fenômenos linguísticos (expressões idiomáticas, por exemplo) geralmente ignorados por outras teorias são considerados pela gramática de construções. Trata-se de um modelo construcional que não se limita aos aspectos meramente formais da língua, e que poderia ter ampliado e enriquecido a análise ao tomar por base o sentido e a experiência corporifi cada dos indivíduos (DUQUE, 2013;BERGEN, 2007).…”

From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again

“…Yet sometimes those critical of the standard cognitivist view continue to rely on notions borrowed from it (e.g. Damasio 1999;Barsalou 2003;Bergen 2007) or to seek out functionalist fodder for explaining 'high-order' cognitive activities (e.g. Clark 1997;Wheeler 2005;Rowlands 2006).…”

“…In the case of simulation semantics, for example, the decoded message is the activated bodily-formatted neural pattern (cf. Bergen 2007;Feldman and Narayanan 2004).…”