Gianelli Claudia, Marzocchi Michele, Borghi Anna M
Division of Cognitive Sciences, University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of BolognaBologna, Italy; Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research CouncilRome, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2017 Feb 7;8:42. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00042. eCollection 2017.
Every day, we primarily experience actions as agents, by having a concrete perspective on our actions, their means and goals. This peculiar perspective is what allows us to successfully plan and execute our actions in a dense social environment. Nevertheless, in this environment actions are also perceived from an observer's perspective. Adopting such a perspective helps us to understand and respond to other's people actions and their outcomes. Importantly, similar experiences of being agent and observer occur also when actions are not physically acted/perceived but are merely linguistically shared. In this paper we present two exploratory studies, one in Italian and one in German, in which we applied a direct comparison of three singular perspectives in combination with different verb categories. First, second and third person pronouns were combined with action and interaction verbs, i.e., verbs implying an interaction with an object - e.g., grasp - or an interaction with an object and another person - e.g., give. By means of kinematics recording, we analyzed participants' reaching-grasping responses to a mouse while they were presented with the different combinations of linguistic stimuli (pronouns and verb type). Results of Experiment 1 on reaching show that, when they are preceded by YOU, interaction verbs reached the velocity peak earlier than action verbs, since a further motor act will follow. Thus pronouns influence perspective taking and while comprehending language we are sensitive to the motor chain organization of verbs. The absence of the same effects in Experiment 2 is likely due to the fact that, being the pronoun in German mandatory, it is perceived as less salient than in Italian. Overall our result supports the idea that language is grounded in the motor system in a flexible way, and highlights the need for cross-linguistic studies in the field of embodied language processing.
每天，我们主要以行动者的身份体验行动，通过对我们的行动、其方式和目标有一个具体的视角。这种独特的视角使我们能够在密集的社会环境中成功地计划和执行我们的行动。然而，在这种环境中，行动也会从观察者的视角被感知。采用这样的视角有助于我们理解并回应他人的行动及其结果。重要的是，当行动不是实际执行/感知到的，而只是通过语言分享时，作为行动者和观察者的类似体验也会发生。在本文中，我们呈现了两项探索性研究，一项是意大利语研究，一项是德语研究，其中我们对三种单一视角与不同动词类别进行了直接比较。第一、第二和第三人称代词与行动动词和互动动词相结合，即暗示与一个物体互动的动词——例如“抓握”，或与一个物体及另一个人互动的动词——例如“给予”。通过运动学记录，我们分析了参与者在面对不同语言刺激（代词和动词类型）组合时对鼠标的伸手抓握反应。实验1关于伸手动作的结果表明，当在动作之前出现“你”时，互动动词比行动动词更早达到速度峰值，因为随后会有进一步的动作。因此，代词会影响视角采择，并且在理解语言时，我们对动词的运动链组织很敏感。实验2中没有出现同样的效果可能是由于这样一个事实，即德语中的代词是强制性的，它被认为不如意大利语中的代词那么突出。总体而言，我们的结果支持了语言以灵活方式基于运动系统的观点，并强调了在具身语言处理领域进行跨语言研究的必要性。
