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Motor Simulation and Verbal Association in Idiom-Idiom Verification: Effects of Imageability

Motor Simulation and Verbal Association in Idiom-Idiom Verification: Effects of Imageability Galina Gradinarova (ggradinarova@nbu.bg) Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology, New Bulgarian University 21 Montevideo Str., 1618 Sofia, Bulgaria Armina Janyan (ajanyan@cogs.nbu.bg) Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology, New Bulgarian University 21 Montevideo Str., 1618 Sofia, Bulgaria Abstract Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that motor simulation contributes to the processing of idioms. A semantic interference paradigm was applied. Critically, imageability of idioms was manipulated. Results of the experiments suggested that processing of highly imageable idioms involved motor simulation in both meaning and familiarity verification tasks. However, low-imageable idioms showed indifference in semantic verification task and a verbal associative facilitation in a familiarity verification task. Keywords: motor simulation; embodiment; understanding; imageability; idioms; RT. language Introduction According to the embodiment paradigm higher-level cognitive processing is based in people’s interaction with the environment and is grounded in lower-level sensory- motor processes. From this perspective, language is of great interest since it has traditionally been viewed as a highly symbolic and abstract system. The embodiment paradigm predicts that language should also be grounded in sensory- motor experience and therefore interactions with the lower- level perceptual and motor systems should occur. A variety of experiments have been devoted to looking into this hypothesis. For example, Glenberg and Kaschak (2002) demonstrated the so called “action-sentence compatibility effect”. Sentences were presented describing movement to or away from the body and the participants had to respond by actually performing a movement to or away from the body. People were faster if the direction of movement implied by the sentence matched the direction of their actual movement, as opposed to when the two directions did not match. Thus, sentence comprehension and motor processes were found to interact. Moreover, this effect was also present when the sentences described transfer of abstract entities (e.g. You told Liz the story) which means that the effect is not restrained to highly literal language describing strictly physical experience, but is also observed at different levels of abstraction. Richardson, Spivey, Barsalou and McRae (2003) also showed that both concrete (e.g. push, lift) and abstract (e.g. respect, own) verbs tend to invoke a particular horizontal or vertical image schema, and that this image schema interacted with people’s performance on both an unrelated object categorization task and a related picture recognition task. Scorolli and Borghi (2007) presented participants with phrases that contained verbs referring to actions with different effectors (HAND, FOOT, MOUTH) and they were asked to make a sensibility judgment by either speaking into a microphone or pressing a pedal. A facilitation effect was observed when the effector involved in the motor response and the one implied by the phrase matched. Thus, the modulation of the motor system appears to be effector-specific. In a study by Bergen, Narayan and Feldman (2003) participants were presented with pictures representing actions performed by the hand, leg, or mouth. After that they saw a verb and were asked to indicate whether the verb described the picture they had just seen. On the critical trials the verbs did not match the actions on the pictures, but they either referred to actions preformed by the same effector or to actions performed by a different effector. If linguistic input triggers activation in a specific motor circuit then it can be expected that a person will need more time to respond if overlapping motor circuits are activated (i.e. responsible for actions with the same effector) rather than non-overlapping ones (responsible for actions with different effectors). Indeed, Bergen et al. (2003) demonstrated a semantic interference effect - participants in their study were slower when both the picture and the verb referred to actions with the same effector rather than to actions with different effectors. Brain imaging also provides evidence for effector-specific motor activation during comprehension of verbs (e.g. Pulvermuller, Haerle & Hummel, 2001) and idioms (Boulenger, Hauk and Pulvermuller, 2009). The results above are at odds with the traditional view on language as highly abstract and operating on amodal symbolic structures. An alternative to the traditional approach on symbolic systems was proposed by Barsalou (Barsalou, 1999; Barsalou, Solomon, &Wu, 1999). According to the theory of perceptual symbol systems (PSS) schematic representations are derived from actual sensory-motor activations, these representations are stored in memory and function as symbols for certain referents. That is, knowledge representation is not abstract and amodal, but grounded and multimodal (based in different modalities). Perceptual systems are organized in frames called simulators that allow entities, states and events to be simulated in the absence of perceptual input. Simulation is defined as “reenactment of perceptual, motor and introspective states acquired during