Abstract
This article sets out to examine the role of symbolic and sensorimotor representations in discourse comprehension. It starts out with a review of the literature on situation models, showing how mental representations are constrained by linguistic and situational factors. These ideas are then extended to more explicitly include sensorimotor representations. Following Zwaan and Madden (2005), the author argues that sensorimotor and symbolic representations mutually constrain each other in discourse comprehension. These ideas are then developed further to propose two roles for abstract concepts in discourse comprehension. It is argued that they serve as pointers in memory, used (1) cataphorically to integrate upcoming information into a sensorimotor simulation, or (2) anaphorically integrate previously presented information into a sensorimotor simulation. In either case, the sensorimotor representation is a specific instantiation of the abstract concept.
Highlights
This article sets out to examine the role of symbolic and sensorimotor representations in discourse comprehension
That comprehension of a stretch of discourse involves the construction of a mental representation of the state of affairs denoted by that text rather than only a mental representation of the text itself
The mental representation of a text is conceptualized as a network of propositions that are linked via the arguments that they share
Summary
In 1999 the present author submitted a manuscript on the eventindexing model. One of the reviewers was quite critical and remarked: BYou’re talking about events and links, but the events are just empty nodes. If people form visual representations of objects, readers should represent the shape of a whole egg and it should be different when they read BThere was an egg in the skillet.^ when asked whether a depicted object was mentioned in the just-read sentence, readers should respond more quickly to a picture of a whole egg than to one of one sunny side up after reading the first sentence, and vice versa for the second sentence These predictions were supported in several experiments (Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002; see Zwaan & Pecher, 2012, for direct replications). Most of this work has used individual words or sentences as stimuli but recent neuroimaging research shows that sensorimotor representations are activated during the comprehension of discourse (e.g., Chow, Mar, Xu, Liu, Wagage, & Braun, 2015; Kurby & Zacks, 2013; Nijhoff & Willems, 2015)
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