Language through the body: The grounding of motor language processing

Embodied theories of language contend that knowledge of semantic concepts, relations, and linguistic cues are grounded within the holistic cognitive lives of language users, giving rise to mental simulation and linguistic knowledge that is fundamentally connected to experiences of perception, sensation, action, and other worldly encounters. This paper presents original experimental research that investigates a) how ongoing mental simulation can affect the processing of a sentence which evokes new mental simulation, b) the degree of detail in mental simulations, and c) whether the subject pronoun of a sentence can encourage readers to adopt a particular perspective in their simulation and how this perspective affects processing speeds. Although statistically inconclusive, the results suggest that mental simulations are involved during the processing of language and that when two closely related mental simulations are evoked nearly simultaneously, there occurs a slight processing interference. There was no statistically appreciable effect of perspective on processing.