Department of Psychology, Language and Cognition Research Group, University of Tübingen, Schleichstr. 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2023 May;51(4):952-965. doi: 10.3758/s13421-022-01367-2. Epub 2022 Oct 28.
Language comprehenders activate mental representations of sensorimotor experiences related to the content of utterances they process. However, it is still unclear whether these sensorimotor simulations are driven by associations with words or by a more complex process of meaning composition into larger linguistic expressions, such as sentences. In two experiments, we investigated whether comprehenders indeed create sentence-based simulations. Materials were constructed such that simulation effects could only emerge from sentence meaning and not from word-based associations alone. We additionally asked when during sentence processing these simulations are constructed, using a garden-path paradigm. Participants read either a garden-path sentence (e.g., "As Mary ate the egg was in the fridge") or a corresponding unambiguous control with the same meaning and words (e.g., "The egg was in the fridge as Mary ate"). Participants then judged whether a depicted entity was mentioned in the sentence or not. In both experiments, picture response times were faster when the picture was compatible (vs. incompatible) with the sentence-based interpretation of the target entity (e.g., both for garden-path and control sentence: an unpeeled egg), suggesting that participants created simulations based on the sentence content and only operating over the sentence as a whole.
语言理解者激活与他们处理的话语内容相关的感觉运动表象。然而，目前仍不清楚这些感觉运动模拟是由与单词的关联驱动的，还是由更复杂的意义构成过程驱动的，例如句子。在两项实验中，我们研究了理解者是否确实会创建基于句子的模拟。材料的构建使得模拟效应只能从句子的意义中产生，而不是仅仅从基于单词的关联中产生。我们还使用花园路径范式询问了在句子处理过程中何时构建这些模拟。参与者阅读了一个花园路径句子（例如，“当玛丽吃鸡蛋时，鸡蛋在冰箱里”）或具有相同含义和单词的相应明确控制句（例如，“当玛丽吃鸡蛋时，鸡蛋在冰箱里”）。然后，参与者判断所描述的实体是否在句子中提到。在两项实验中，当图片与目标实体的基于句子的解释（例如，花园路径句和控制句：未剥皮的鸡蛋）相匹配（与不匹配）时，图片的反应时间会更快，这表明参与者根据句子内容创建了模拟，并且仅在整个句子上运行。
