Simulating Semantics: What Individual Differences in Motor Imagery Can Tell Us About Language Processing
Date
2020-06-05
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Abstract
Over the last 20 years there has been substantial debate and progress towards understanding how cognition may be embodied and, specific to language processing, how multimodal systems may support semantic representation. Despite this progress, the actual processes and mechanisms of modal simulations that are engaged during semantic processing have been under-specified in most theories. In my thesis research, I address this by investigating whether motor imagery ability is related to language processing, with an individual differences approach. Using a combination of implicit and explicit motor imagery tasks and questionnaires, I identified two latent factors that represent individual motor imagery ability and examined whether these factors could account for significant variation in response time during three different language tasks: a lexical decision task, syntactic classification task, and sentence-picture verification task. There were no significant relationships between imagery ability and response time in any of the tasks, however a number of previously reported effects were replicated, most notably the body-object interaction effect, with words higher in body-object interaction (and thus associated with more sensorimotor information) processed more quickly than words low in body-object interaction. While the results suggest that individual differences in motor imagery cannot account for differences in semantic processing, there is still much to learn about the underlying mechanisms of modal simulations proposed by embodied theories of cognition and their relationship to motor imagery.
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Keywords
Semantic Representation, Embodied Cognition, Motor Imagery
Citation
Muraki, E. J. (2020). Simulating Semantics: What Individual Differences in Motor Imagery Can Tell Us About Language Processing (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.