Sentence comprehension affects the dynamics of bimanual coordination: implications for embodied cognition.
Anne J Olmstead, Navin Viswanathan, Karen A Aicher, Carol A Fowler
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) December 2009 DOI: 10.1080/17470210902846765 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Experimental study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key findings | The dynamics of a bimanual rhythmic task differed when participants judged sentences describing performable actions compared with sentences describing non-performable events. The authors argue this pattern supports embodied cognition accounts and that simulation-focused paradigms should be supplemented with tasks probing motor-system organization during language comprehension. |
Abstract
Recent work in embodied cognition has demonstrated that language comprehension involves the motor system (e.g., Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). Such findings are often attributed to mechanisms involving simulations of linguistically described events (Barsalou, 1999; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008). We propose that research paradigms in which simulation is the central focus need to be augmented with paradigms that probe the organization of the motor system during language comprehension. The use of well-studied motor tasks may be appropriate to this endeavour. To this end, we present a study in which participants perform a bimanual rhythmic task (Kugler & Turvey, 1987) while judging the plausibility of sentences. We show that the dynamics of the bimanual task differ when participants judge sentences describing performable actions as opposed to sentences describing events that are not performable. We discuss the general implications of our results for accounts of embodied cognition.