Title
Moving words: dynamic representations in language comprehension
Abstract
Eighty-two participants listened to sentences and then judged whether two sequentially presented visual objects were the same. On critical trials, participants heard a sentence describe the motion of a ball toward or away from the observer (e.g., “The pitcher hurled the softball to you”). Seven hundred and fifty milliseconds after the offset of the sentence, a picture of an object was presented for 500ms, followed by another picture. On critical trials, the two pictures depicted the kind of ball mentioned in the sentence. The second picture was displayed 175ms after the first. Crucially, it was either slightly larger or smaller than the first picture, thus suggesting movement of the ball toward or away from the observer. Participants responded more quickly when the implied movement of the balls matched the movement described in the sentence. This result provides support for the view that language comprehension involves dynamic perceptual simulations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1016/j.cogsci.2004.03.004
Cognitive Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Visual motion,Implied motion,Perceptual representations,Language comprehension,Mental simulation,Embodied cognition
Visual Objects,Ball (bearing),Psychology,Cognitive psychology,Psycholinguistics,Perception,Linguistics,Sentence,Comprehension,Visual perception,Mental representation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
4
0364-0213
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
17
3.90
2
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rolf A. Zwaan1459.09
Carol J. Madden2174.24
Richard H. Yaxley3296.08
Mark E. Aveyard4265.50