Abstract
Studies of embodied cognition have shown that comprehenders process iconic word pairs (attic-basement) more quickly than reverse-iconic pairs (basement-attic) when the pairs are presented to them in a vertical spatial arrangement. This effect disappears in a horizontal spatial arrangement. This has been claimed to show that comprehenders perceptually simulate these word pairs. A complementary explanation is that linguistic conceptualizations (word order) reflect prelinguistic conceptualizations (spatial iconicity), whereby comprehenders use these linguistic conceptualizations in the comprehension process. The results of corpus linguistic, rating, and semantic judgment studies reported here supported this explanation: Iconic word pairs were more frequent than reverse-iconic word pairs; frequency of word order explained response times in a semantic judgment task better than iconicity did; and when iconic word pairs were presented in a horizontal arrangement, the iconicity effect disappeared, but the word order effect remained. These findings show that spatial iconicity patterns are reflected in word order patterns and that comprehenders are sensitive to these word order patterns in language-processing tasks. nt]mis|This research was supported by Grant NSF-IIS-0416128. The usual exculpations apply. I thank Rick Dale, David Rapp, and Rolf Zwaan for comments on previous drafts.
Article PDF
References
Benor, S. B., & Levy, R. (2006). The chicken or the egg? A probabilistic analysis of English binomials. Language, 82, 233–278.
Bergen, B. K., Lindsay, S., Matlock, T., & Narayanan, S. (2007). Spatial and linguistic aspects of visual imagery in sentence comprehension. Cognitive Science, 31, 733–764.
Brants, T., & Franz, A. (2006). Web 1T 5-gram Version 1. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Cooper, W. E., & Ross, J. R. (1975). World order. In R. E. Grossman, L. J. San, & T. J. Vance (Eds.), Papers from the parasession on functionalism (pp. 63–111). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Givón, T. (1989). Mind, code and context: Essays in pragmatics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Greenberg, J. H. (1963). Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of grammar (pp. 73–113). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kaden, S. E., Wapner, S., & Werner, H. (1955). Studies in physiognomic perception: II. Effect of directional dynamics of pictured objects and of words on the position of the apparent horizon. Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary & Applied, 39, 61–70.
Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211–240.
Landauer, T. K., McNamara, D. S., Dennis, S., & Kintsch, W. (Eds.) (2007). Handbook of latent semantic analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press.
Lorch, R. F., Jr., & Myers, J. L. (1990). Regression analyses of repeated measures data in cognitive research: A comparison of three different methods. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 16, 149–157.
Louwerse, M. M. (2007). Iconicity in amodal symbolic representations. In T. K. Landauer, D. S. McNamara, S. Dennis, & W. Kintsch (Eds.), Handbook of latent semantic analysis (pp. 107–120). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Louwerse, M. M., Cai, Z., Hu, X., Ventura, M., & Jeuniaux, P. (2006). Cognitively inspired natural-language based knowledge representations: Further explorations of latent semantic analysis. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools, 15, 1021–1040.
Louwerse, M. M., & Jeuniaux, P. (2008). Language comprehension is both embodied and symbolic. In M. de Vega, A. Glenberg, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Symbols and embodiment: Debates on meaning and cognition (pp. 309–326). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Pecher, D., & Zwaan, R. A. (Eds.) (2005). Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richter, T. (2006). What is wrong with ANOVA and multiple regression? Analyzing sentence reading times with hierarchical linear models. Discourse Processes, 41, 221–250.
Seidenberg, M. S., MacDonald, M. C., & Saffran, J. R. (2002). Does grammar start where statistics stop? Science, 298, 553–554.
Šetič, M., & Domijan, D. (2007). The influence of vertical spatial orientation on property verification. Language & Cognitive Processes, 22, 297–312.
Spivey, M. J., & Geng, J. J. (2001). Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: Eye movements to absent objects. Psychological Research, 65, 235–241.
Zwaan, R. A., & Yaxley, R. H. (2003). Spatial iconicity affects semantic relatedness judgments. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 954–958.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Louwerse, M.M. Embodied relations are encoded in language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15, 838–844 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.4.838
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.4.838