Language Comprehenders Mentally Represent the Shapes of Objects

By Rolf A. Zwaan, Robert A. Stanfield, Richard H. Yaxley. Psychology Science, 2002

796 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined the prediction that people activate perceptual symbols during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences describing an animal or object in a certain location. The shape of the object or animal changed as a function of its location (e.g., eagle in the sky, eagle in a nest). However, this change was only implied by the sentences. After reading a sentence, subjects were presented with a line drawing of the object in question. They judged whether the object had been mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 1) or simply named the object (Experiment 2). In both cases, responses were faster when the pictured object's shape matched the shape implied by the sentence than when there was a mismatch. These results support the hypothesis that perceptual symbols are routinely activated in language comprehension.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4611eff86360ce7204b6949bf71c868de74ebdc8

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Act-In: An integrated view of memory mechanisms (2014, methodology): “To illustrate these studies, we will evoke only the work of Zwaan, Stanfield, and Yuxley (2002).”
Does understanding negation entail affirmation?: An examination of negated metaphors (2006, background): “According to mental models (or situation models) theories, understanding text involves constructing models of those situations that are communicated by the text (Garnham and Oakhill, 1992; Glenberg and Mathew, 1992; Glenberg et al., 1987; Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998; Zwaan et al., 2002).”
The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience (2008, background): “Zwaan, Stanfield, and Yaxley (2002) demonstrated that nouns automatically evoke in one’s mind the representational shapes of the objects to which each noun refers.”
Facilitating Understanding of Movements in Dynamic Visualizations: an Embodied Perspective (2011, result): “These results, together with other studies, suggest that the mental representation responsible for our comprehension of motion sentences likely involves perceptual simulation of the described events (Stanfield and Zwaan 2001; Zwaan et al. 2002).”
Processing negated sentences with contradictory predicates: Is a door that is not open mentally closed? (2006, background): “…in which we presented participants with sentences such as There was no eagle in the sky/nest and subsequently asked them to decide whether a depicted object had been mentioned in the sentence (see Kaup et al., submitted for publication; see Zwaan et al., 2002 for the introduction of this paradigm).”