Sensorimotor Grounding of Chinese Novel Concepts Constructed From Language Alone

Abstract

The embodied cognitive view of language asserts that concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that the response times were faster when the movement direction of participants is congruent with the referent position of presented words than that under incongruent condition. This is thought to be evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. Extrapolating from this view, this study aims to explore how concepts without direct experience can be grounded. Participants learned novel concepts related to upward or downward concepts only through a two-sentence description and learned randomly paired novel words. In both experiments, participants judged the sensibility of sentences by upward or downward movements, with the sentences containing novel concepts in Experiment 1 and containing novel words in Experiment 2. Both two experiments found the congruency effect, indicating that when understanding a sentence containing a novel concept or novel word, the sensorimotor experience of the already known concepts in description had been activated automatically, thus realizing the indirect grounding of the novel concept.