Experimental methods for simulation semantics

Abstract

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 (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Varela et al. 1991; Clark 1997; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2005) is quite straightforward. It’s the notion that aspects of cognition cannot be understood without referring to aspects of the systems they are embedded in – in the biology of the organism, including its brain and the rest of its body, and in its physical and social context. When it comes to understanding language, the embodied perspective suggests that meaning centrally involves the activation of perceptual, motor, social, and