Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2011 Dec;110(4):659-75. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2011.06.009. Epub 2011 Jul 30.
We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7-13years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7-10years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought.
我们测试了一个关于语言的具身理论，该理论提出理解者会对他们听到和读到的事件产生感知模拟。在实验 1 中，儿童（7-13 岁）完成了图片验证任务。每张图片之前都会播放一段预先录制的口头句子，描述一个与所描绘物体的形状或方向匹配或不匹配的实体。对于匹配的图片，反应更快，这表明参与者已经形成了对句子的类似感知的情境模型。对于匹配图片的优势并没有随着年龄的增长而增加。实验 2 将这些发现扩展到书面语言领域。参与者（7-10 岁）在大声朗读句子后，通过阅读来验证图片。结果表明，即使在阅读费力的情况下，儿童也会对所描述的事件构建感知模拟。我们提出，感知模拟在发展语言理解方面比以前认为的更具核心作用。
