Embodiment Of Language Research Articles

Effects of Intentional Motor Actions on Embodied Language Processing

Embodied theories of language processing suggest that this motor simulation is an automatic and necessary component of meaning representation. If this is the case, then language and action systems should be mutually dependent (i.e., motor activity should selectively modulate processing of words with an action-semantic component). In this paper, we investigate in two experiments whether evidence for mutual dependence can be found using a motor priming paradigm. Specifically, participants performed either an intentional or a passive motor task while processing words denoting manipulable and nonmanipulable objects. The performance rates (Experiment 1) and response latencies (Experiment 2) in a lexical-decision task reveal that participants performing an intentional action were positively affected in the processing of words denoting manipulable objects as compared to nonmanipulable objects. This was not the case if participants performed a secondary passive motor action (Experiment 1) or did not perform a secondary motor task (Experiment 2). The results go beyond previous research showing that language processes involve motor systems to demonstrate that the execution of motor actions has a selective effect on the semantic processing of words. We suggest that intentional actions activate specific parts of the neural motor system, which are also engaged for lexical-semantic processing of action-related words and discuss the beneficial versus inhibitory nature of this relationship. The results provide new insights into the embodiment of language and the bidirectionality of effects between language and action processing.

Motor movement matters: The flexible abstractness of inner speech

Inner speech is typically characterized as either the activation of abstract linguistic representations or a detailed articulatory simulation that lacks only the production of sound. We present a study of the speech errors that occur during the inner recitation of tongue-twister-like phrases. Two forms of inner speech were tested: inner speech without articulatory movements and articulated (mouthed) inner speech. Although mouthing one's inner speech could reasonably be assumed to require more articulatory planning, prominent theories assume that such planning should not affect the experience of inner speech and, consequently, the errors that are "heard" during its production. The errors occurring in articulated inner speech exhibited the phonemic similarity effect and the lexical bias effect--two speech-error phenomena that, in overt speech, have been localized to an articulatory-feature-processing level and a lexical-phonological level, respectively. In contrast, errors in unarticulated inner speech did not exhibit the phonemic similarity effect--just the lexical bias effect. The results are interpreted as support for a flexible abstraction account of inner speech. This conclusion has ramifications for the embodiment of language and speech and for the theories of speech production.

Grasping language – A short story on embodiment

The new concept of embodied cognition theories has been enthusiastically studied by the cognitive sciences, by as well as such disparate disciplines as philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, and robotics. Embodiment theory provides the framework for ongoing discussions on the linkage between “low” cognitive processes as perception and “high” cognition as language processing and comprehension, respectively. This review gives an overview along the lines of argumentation in the ongoing debate on the embodiment of language and employs an ALE meta-analysis to illustrate and weigh previous findings.The collected evidence on the somatotopic activation of motor areas, abstract and concrete word processing, as well as from reported patient and timing studies emphasizes the important role of sensorimotor areas in language processing and supports the hypothesis that the motor system is activated during language comprehension.

Swing it to the left, swing it to the right: enacting flexible spatial language using a neurodynamic framework

Research is continually expanding the empirical and theoretical picture of embodiment and dynamics in language. To date, however, a formalized neural dynamic framework for embodied linguistic processes has yet to emerge. To advance embodied theories of language, the present work develops a formalized neural dynamic framework of spatial language that explicitly integrates linguistic processes and dynamic sensory-motor systems. We then implement and test our spatial language architecture on a robotic platform continuously linked to real-time camera input. In a suite of tasks using everyday objects we demonstrate the framework's capacity for both contextually-dependent behavioral flexibility and the seamless integration of spatial, non-spatial, and symbolic representations. To our knowledge this is the first unified, neurally-grounded architecture integrating these processes and behaviors.

‘Grammar. In a Breath’: Breathing in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

This essay won the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, American Section. This essay analyzes the trope of breath in Tender Buttons. It becomes clear, when diagramming Stein's poetry, that breath appears at different levels of interpretation (phonologically, semantically, and structurally). Here, I apply William Gass's theory of word spatialization and use diagrams as interpretive tools. The visualization of Stein's words leads to an exploration of repetition and double structures as expressions of inhalation and exhalation in individual poems. Such doublings construct variations on the themes of opening and closing which mirror the process of respiration. These motifs reappear in different sections of Tender Buttons, creating a structural breathing that connects the poems in the collection. Such embodiment of language requires that we think of Stein's poetry as a body breathing in and out to the reader, and forces us to reconsider reading as a sensual activity.

Performing Determinism: Disability Culture Poetry

“Performing Determinism” discusses the performance of disability through poetry: the instability of language, the ability of words to clasp both generic and specific meaning, and the gaps that surround the performances of self. Disability culture acts as a frame for the inquiry, as the essay discusses crip aesthetics, crip critical practice, and the embodiment of language. In the reading of poems by Jim Ferris and Stephen Kuusisto, disability culture emerges as an impossible horizon of desire, and as the ground for contemporary performances of criticism and writing. Citation becomes performative, and creates repetition in difference.

Dialogicality in languages, minds and brains: is there a convergence between dialogism and neuro-biology?

The aim of this contribution is to take a number of key notions in dialogical theory, and look for their possible counterparts in recent neuroscience. This comprises points like other-orientation, relationism and context-interdependence, embodiment of language, responsive understanding, potentialities, unfinalisability, implicitness and degrees of awareness, and redundancy of processing. The conclusion is that there is indeed an incipient convergence between neuro-biology and cognitive dynamics, on the one hand, and dialogism on the other. A general dialogical framework has something to offer to cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, not in the least because dialogue and dialogical interaction appear to be more fundamental than language (at least as language has been conceived most often). Brains are complex organisms coordinating the apperception of and interventions into the world, rather than producing and processing agency-free representations of the world.

Practice, Semiotics, and the Limits of Philosophy

Practice, Semiotics, and the Limits of Philosophy John J. Stuhr Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that each generation must write its own books or, rather, the books for the next generation. Many American philosophers have shared this goal and have taken up this task. They have wanted to think forward, wanted reconstruction in philosophy, wanted their own, new, original relations to the universe. If this is possible, how is it possible? This is a pragmatic question, but it seems to be a particularly difficult question for those pragmatists who are committed to: pluralism (such that the books that speak to one person may not address or be alive for or be instrumental for another person); time and finitude (such that change, precariousness, and difference are ineliminable, and that theorizing is always situated and provincial); and practice (such that beliefs are habits of meaning-full, meaning-giving, embodied action.). In their illuminating and genuinely original new books, both Robert Innis and Richard Shusterman provide substantial resources for reconstruction in philosophy today. Here is the "cash-value" of this claim: If you have not already done so, you should buy these books and then you should read them. In Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics, Innis presents us with a scholarly tour de force—a book that draws on figures familiar to members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy as well as on European authors too often at (or beyond) today's professional canonical margins. Beginning with the observation that we have experiences in which we "fuse" with the probes or instruments we employ and that extend us to the world in new ways, and reaffirming the view (from John Dewey, Ernst Cassirer, and others) of tools and language both as ways of making the absent present, Innis develops the "'probal' nature of language and technics as embodied in, and as embodied forms of, perception" (Innis 2002, 3): "Language and technics are treated in this book as twin 'forms of sense,' that is, vast weblike systems of meaning-making in which we dwell, into which we have extended ourselves, and upon which we must fatefully rely. They are also 'forms of sense' in that they shape, form, and mold the very channels in which our body-based perceptual systems grow and develop. Language and technics are alike in not [End Page 73] just shaping but also growing out of their perceptual, actional, and social roots" (3, 4). "We attend from them," Innis writes, "for attending to something"; both language and technics have this "from/to" structure" (3). Innis thus develops an account of the irreducible sociality (83), nature, scope, and consequences of systems of signs and systems of tools—and of the ways in which their forms are embodied in perception while also being embodied forms of perception. At the close of his introduction, Innis writes: "What I am arguing for is, then, the analytical, descriptive, and normative power of a set of overlapping and mutually reinforcing ways of thinking"—thinking with the combined conceptual resources of pragmatism and semiotics—"about our embodiment in language and technics as forms of sense. I am exploring and attempting to justify, what I consider to be pivotal forms, of sense abut the forms of sense" (14). What is most distinctive and, I think, most important here is Innis's understanding of the ways in which meaningful perception saturates language and tools while, at the same time, they seep through and constitute perception. As Innis writes at the end of his first chapter on the perceptual roots of linguistic meaning, "Not only, then, is perception embodied in language; language is embodied in perception" (50). And, as for language, so too for technics. So, what is the analytical, descriptive, and normative power of this view? The descriptive power, the phenomenological illumination, of Innis's account of meaning-taken and meaning-making seems immense. His "rotations" of pragmatists and semiotic theorists recast and advance the insights and theoretical strengths of each, and his examples—particularly, I think, his discussions of aesthetic experience and art—make clear the relevance and practical applicability of this theory. Let me close this portion of my "fan...

The semiotics and ecologyof language learning - perception, voice, identity and democracy

This presentation will outline the principles of a semiotic and ecological approach to language learning, and the practical consequences for classroom teaching and learning that follow from taking such an approach. A semiotic and ecological view of language and of learning entails that the context – physical, social and symbolic – is a central element in teaching and learning, and that issues such as embodiment of language and spatio-temporal structures are instrumental in the creation of learning opportunities. The approach emphasizes the development of the learner’s social self and identity within the context of a democratic community of learning. At the practical level the presentation will discuss project-based learning and the roles of modeling, scaffolding and collaborative learning.

Evolution of an optimal lexicon under constraints from embodiment.

Research in language evolution is concerned with the question of how complex linguistic structures can emerge from the interactions between many communicating individuals. Thus it complements psycholinguistics, which investigates the processes involved in individual adult language processing, and child language development studies, which investigate how children learn a given (fixed) language. We focus on the framework of language games and argue that they offer a fresh and formal perspective on many current debates in cognitive science, including those on the synchronic-versus-diachronic perspective on language, the embodiment and situatedness of language and cognition, and the self-organization of linguistic patterns. We present a measure for the quality of a lexicon in a population, and derive four characteristics of the optimal lexicon: specificity, coherence, distinctiveness, and regularity. We present a model of lexical dynamics that shows the spontaneous emergence of these characteristics in a distributed population of individuals that incorporate embodiment constraints. Finally, we discuss how research in cognitive science could contribute to improving existing language game models.

Technologies of Language and the Embodied History of the Deaf

Looking back, it appears that linguistics was made possible by the invention of writing. Looking ahead, it appears that a science of language and communication, both optic and acoustic, will be enabled . . . not by refinements in rotational systems, but by increasing sophistication in techniques of recording, analyzing, and manipulating visible and auditory events electronically. (Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox 1995, 13-14) MUCH OF the of deaf people has been written by hearing people, and the that exists is, in large part, a of the institutions and concepts created by the hearing for and about the deaf.1 This situation is not unlike that of other minorities who have been kept at the margin of and whose stories have been told by others and from the point of view of others. Anthropologists and historians have made efforts to correct this distortion through the recording of the stories of marginalized groups, who traditionally have had access neither to socially prestigious forms of expression nor to their supporting technologies of production, dissemination, and preservation. For groups without writing, efforts have also been made to teach them both a script for writing their language and the computer technologies necessary to physically produce and circulate their own stories.2 Deaf people, however, differ from other groups because of their unique experience of language acquisition. The linguistic situation of people who are deaf has two major consequences that make the telling of their stories a particular challenge for historians. The first is the intrinsic linguistic diversity of the deaf community, and the second is the specific nature of the language that, for many deaf people, is their identifying achievement: sign language. Because of the nature of deafness and the variety of circumstances that may impinge on the language development of a deaf person, many linguistic outcomes are possible, from exclusive use of the spoken language of the hearing community to the exclusive use of the sign language of the deaf community, and-in still far too many cases-to minimal language use, in which no language becomes fully developed. Only a very few of those who are born deaf or who become deaf at an early age achieve fluency in the spoken language of the hearing community and then only with great effort. For deaf people, the only route to full language mastery is through a sign language, but access to sign language is not always guaranteed because the majority of those born deaf are born into hearing families. On the other hand, the possibility of achieving fluency and expressiveness in sign language (but not language) is what, above all else, motivates the formation of deaf communities. Within these communities, deaf individuals develop a sense of self as a whole person, different from the image they confront in the hearing world and even within their own families, where they are commonly seen, with rare exceptions, as deficient (Padden 1989).3 For the historian, it is significant that the sign languages of deaf communities have no historically developed writing system. This means that sign languages represent a form of primary orality, in the terminology of Ong (1982,16), that is, an little influenced by writing. In addition, the fact that the of the deaf is signed, and not oral, complicates its relation to a possible written form and presents a challenge to the usual techniques and practices of recording, documentation, and elaboration of history. In this article I intend first to discuss briefly the linguistic situation of the deaf; I then discuss the shift in linguistic ideology from graphocentrism to orocentrism, which forms the scenario in which deaf people are struggling to legitimize their natural form of expression, sign language; I then question both graphocentrism and orocentrism and propose neutral terms and a neutral perspective from which one can view orality and oral history as the embodiment of language and experience. …

Book Review: The Embodiment and Ecology of Language and Literacy

Most, if not perhaps all, models of language and literacy in mainstream scholarship are constructed exclusively within human parameters, whether this is done through claims to representation, or through interpretation, construction, or deconstruction. The road one walks with David Abram, however, takes a different path to the very grounding of language in a sensuous world that exists as more than human. Abram takes us directly into the realms of sensuous perception within reciprocal relations with one's surroundings, relations that give rise to utterances, to language, to literacy. Reading Abram's award-winning book, the reader is in for a treat of superb quality. (Abram is an ecologist and philosopher, who received a doctorate in philosophy from SUNY-Stony Brook.

Embodiment in Discourse

Editorial Embodiment Over in Discourse the past years, approaches within disciplines across the social sci- (e.g., ences and humanities, including Anthropology Duranti, 1997; Duranti and Goodwin, 1992), Applied Linguistics tion (e.g., Gutierrez, 1995), (e.g., Goodwin, 1981; Ochs, 1992), Educa- (e.g., and Sociology Heritage, 1984; Sacks et. al., 1974; Schegloff, 1972), have converged tion in their appreciation of language, interac- and culture as embodied phenomena (Schegloff, Ochs, & Thompson, 1996). While these various approaches share many elements, we believe one is central: language, interaction, and culture can be most fruitfully investigated via the de- tailed examination of courses of conduct unfolding in real time. Celebrating the core, as well as the broadest, elements of this convergence, UCLA's 1997 Confer- in ence on Language, Interaction, and Culture chose 'Embodiment its Discourse' as theme. The fruits of this endeavor are collected place to their in this volume. Contributing in the first own disciplines of Anthropology, Ap- Germanic Languages, and Sociology, the following seven papers participate in the above described 'core' by relying on transcripts and video stills drawn from audio and video recorded data. Beyond this shared ele- ment, however, these papers are most striking for their range of focus. Briefly introducing each should give some indication of the rich understanding facilitated by focusing on the embodiment of culture, language and interaction in discourse. plied Linguistics, Education, At that it its most literal, 'Embodiment in Discourse' can be understood to thematize discourse. Both Kidwell and is participants-in-bodies who conduct talk. Wu fo- cus on participants' active management of participation frameworks through a combination of gaze, gesture and Kidwell expands our understanding of the category 'recipient' by focusing on what she aptly names 'recipient proactivity.' As Kidwell notes, the current literature on recipiency primarily emphasizes how speakers shape talk for their recipients. In contrast, she focuses squarely on recipiency itself as a course of action by analyzing a stretch of interaction in which an unaddressed participant constitutes herself as a recipient of in-progress talk. Kidwell describes how this participant first demonstrates her recipiency through talk. gaze direction and escalates her intervention to include While Kidwell 's pa- per highlights that gesture, gaze and talk can be alternative resources, strates the Wu demon- depth at which they can work in concert. Wu first describes two turn formats that speakers of Mandarin deploy to involve previously inactive partici- pants, tive one that continues the trajectory of prior talk, and a second that is disjunc- with it. Wu then demonstrates that the different ways that speakers comport themselves in the course of uttering these turns 'embody' their orientation to the Issues in Applied Linguistics ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 8 No. 2. 81-83 1997, Regents of the University of California

Simulation of chip form estimation and control for lathe turning

Lathe turning may produce long, continuous chips, or short, broken chips. Broken chips carry away heat and may reduce tool temperature. Continuous chips may snarl and interfere with machine operation. Inside diameter turning or thread cutting may be unusually susceptible to snarls from continuous chips. Other researchers have constructed acoustic emission (AE) chip form monitors. A mathematical model and its advanced continuous simulation language (ACSL) embodiment are described. A simulation study suggests that straight forward modifications hold promise of in-process chip length sensors that can be used for feedback control.

Absent Father, Passive Son: The Dilemma of Rickie Elliott in The Longest Journey

The fundamental task of every son, as the neo-Freudian Jacques Lacan has pointed out, is to come to terms with his father. In order to do so, he must abandon the imaginary state of non-differentiation or fusion with the mother to assume his symbolic place within the family triad. Not only the child's predecessor within the family, but the symbolic embodiment of law and language, the father is the transcendent signifier whose legacy is orderly progression both in life and in narrative. Since language expresses desire, which originates in absence, the child's acknowledgment of the father is accompanied by a permanent sense of loss. Accordingly, the child's accommodation is always problematical and imperfect. The imperfect outcome of this universal struggle gets expressed in the nature of narrative itself: although primarily linear and orderly, all narrative collapses at times into disorder-into digression, evasion, omission, ambiguity, and contradiction. Some narratives irretrievably founder on the way, either broken on the hard rock of Scylla, the father, or swallowed by the chaos and absorption of the mother, Charybdis.' The Longest Journey is such a narrative. While its unfolding appears to be linear, it is actually circular and repetitious. Finally it collapses upon itself. The unconscious and personal of Forster's published novels, The Longest Journey was, in Forster's words, the one he was most glad to have written.2 He nevertheless was regretfully aware that it was seriously flawed. Critics have generally agreed. Indeed, the book suffers from a number of problems, among them the author's ambivalence