Yaxley Richard H, Zwaan Rolf A
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1270, USA.
Cognition. 2007 Oct;105(1):229-36. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.09.003. Epub 2006 Oct 30.
In this study, participants performed a sentence-picture verification task in which they read sentences about an agent viewing an object (e.g., moose) through a differentially occlusive medium (e.g., clean vs. fogged goggles), and then verified whether a subsequently pictured object was mentioned in the previous sentence. Picture verification latencies were shorter when the resolution of the pictured object and the resolution implied by the sentence matched than when they did not. These results suggest that the degree of visibility implied in linguistic context can influence immediate object interpretation. These data suggest that readers mentally simulate the visibility of objects during language comprehension. Thus, the simulation of linguistic descriptions is not limited to the activation of intrinsic object properties (e.g., object shape), but also invokes the perceptibility of referential objects given implied environmental context.
在本研究中，参与者执行了一项句子-图片验证任务，即他们阅读关于一个主体通过不同遮挡介质（如干净的与有雾的护目镜）观看一个物体（如驼鹿）的句子，然后验证随后呈现的图片中的物体是否在前一句中被提及。当图片中物体的分辨率与句子所暗示的分辨率匹配时，图片验证潜伏期比不匹配时更短。这些结果表明，语言语境中隐含的可见度程度会影响对物体的即时理解。这些数据表明，读者在语言理解过程中会在脑海中模拟物体的可见性。因此，对语言描述的模拟不仅限于激活物体的内在属性（如物体形状），还会根据隐含的环境语境调用所指物体的可感知性。
