Fictive motion involves mental simulation in second language comprehension

Abstract

Recent studies have confirmed that people produce mental simulation when processing sentences including literal motion, abstract motion or fictive motion. However, the doubt is whether EFL learners mentally simulate fictive motion during language comprehension as native English speaker did. The paper addressed the question with simulation time effects, one of the experimental methods in simulation semantics in one experiment made of 4 tasks. In each task, subjects read a short story-slow versus fast scenario, easy versus difficult scenario and short versus long distance scenario, then made a timed decision whether the target fictive motion sentence related to the story or not. The results are that the response latency in different scenarios is significant. Thereby we conclude that EFL learners activates mental simulation in the same way as native English speaker when processing sentences involved the fictive motion.