Development of Embodied Word Meanings: Sensorimotor Effects in Children's Lexical Processing.

Michelle Inkster,Ellen Lloyd,Michele Wellsby,Penny M Pexman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00317

Abstract

Previous research showed an effect of words’ rated body–object interaction (BOI) in children’s visual word naming performance, but only in children 8 years of age or older (Wellsby and Pexman, 2014a). In that study, however, BOI was established using adult ratings. Here we collected ratings from a group of parents for children’s BOI experience (child-BOI). We examined effects of words’ child-BOI and also words’ imageability on children’s responses in an auditory word naming task, which is suited to the lexical processing skills of younger children. We tested a group of 54 children aged 6–7 years and a comparison group of 25 adults. Results showed significant effects of both imageability and child-BOI on children’s auditory naming latencies. These results provide evidence that children younger than 8 years of age have richer semantic representations for high imageability and high child-BOI words, consistent with an embodied account of word meaning.

Highlights

Theories of embodied cognition emphasize the importance of sensorimotor experience for acquiring and representing conceptual knowledge (e.g., Glenberg, 2015)
To collect ratings of child-body–object interaction (BOI), we presented a separate group of 16 adults with the 60 high imageability words
Auditory naming accuracy was high for all other items (97.17% for children, 98.69% for adults): too high, to warrant further analysis of the accuracy data

Summary

Introduction

Theories of embodied cognition emphasize the importance of sensorimotor experience for acquiring and representing conceptual knowledge (e.g., Glenberg, 2015). The embodied cognition framework has had a strong influence in recent research on adult language processing. It has received less research attention in the developmental literature and yet, as Wellsby and Pexman (2014b) argued, in order to refine theories of embodied cognition it is important to consider and fully integrate developmental findings. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether children’s previous sensorimotor experience with words’ referents influences their lexical processing of those words. There is extensive research examining the effects of imageability in visual word recognition tasks (e.g., Strain et al, 1995; Cortese et al, 1997). Word recognition is facilitated for words with referents that can be more imaged/sensed

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Results

Conclusion