Abstract
Abundant empirical evidence suggests that visual perception and motor responses are involved in language comprehension (‘grounding’). However, when modeling the grounding of sentence comprehension on a word-by-word basis, linguistic representations and cognitive processes are rarely made fully explicit. This article reviews representational formalisms and associated (computational) models with a view to accommodating incremental and compositional grounding effects. Are different representation formats equally suitable and what mechanisms and representations do models assume to accommodate grounding effects? I argue that we must minimally specify compositional semantic representations, a set of incremental processes/mechanisms, and an explicit link from the assumed processes to measured behavior. Different representational formats can be contrasted in psycholinguistic modeling by holding the set of processes/mechanisms constant; contrasting different processes/mechanisms is possible by holding representations constant. Such psycholinguistic modeling could be applied across a wide range of experimental investigations and complement computational modeling.
Highlights
A central question has been to what extent lexical-semantic meaning overlaps with representations from visual perception and action and to what extent visual perceptual and action representations are essential for understanding the meaning of words
Evidence for embodied language processing comes from a range of behavioral and neuroscientific measures
Given the evidence in favor of incremental and compositional grounding, implicating the conceptual level and aspects of meaning that reach into motoric representations/processes, we can assess models of language against the following benchmarks: 1. Compositionality: How/to what extent are language representations related to visual perception or action beyond the lexical level? (a) What level(s) of linguistic representation are grounded? (b) Are representations implicated in attention and manual responses included?
Summary
Over the past three decades, many areas of cognitive science have taken up the idea that cognitive. Among these are animal cognition (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996), neuroscience (Chiel & Beer, 1997), artificial intelligence (e.g., Brooks & Stein, 1994; Steels & Brooks, 1995), philosophy (Clark, 1997), and language Effects of grounding are at least partially sensitive to constituent order and its semantic interpretation This sensitivity suggests that in accommodating effects of grounding, we must pay attention to representations beyond the lexical level and their incremental interaction. On the basis of the review, I argue that it would be advantageous to better specify linguistic representations, their incremental construction, and their link to dependent measures prior to data collection
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