The Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect Of Simple Sentence Including Abstract Verb

There're many researches on mental simulation and sentence understanding. But people have not paid enough attention to the researches on linguistic mechanism of mental simulation of language about action. The experimental material in Glenberg's article (2002) is sentence with double-object structure. It can't be proved whether the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) of abstract transfer sentence is invoked by linguistic construction or by individual words. The causation of action-sentence compatibility effect of sentences including abstract verb hasn't been discussed.The purpose of the research is to explore the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect of simple sentences including abstract verb and to investigate the relation of verb and ACE of simple sentences including abstract verb.The research adopted mixed experimental designs to explore the Action Sentence Compatibility Effect of simple sentence including abstract verb during reading comprehension. It took the Chinese simple sentences including abstract verb as experimental materials. The response latency of judgment of sentence meaning was collected as the experimental data. There were two experiments to investigate the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect of affirmative sentences and negative sentences.In experiment 1, it took the Chinese simple affirmative sentences including abstract verb as experimental materials. Each pair of sentences has the same subject and object. Some of the predicate verbs are away from body and some of them are toward the body. If the process speed is quicker when the action direction and the sentence direction are consistent than they're inconsistent, the direction of verb is the causation of ACE. It can be inferred that ACE has relation with verbs when understanding sentences including abstract action, equally to the sentences including concrete action.In experiment 2, it took the Chinese negative sentences including abstract verb as experimental materials with the same experimental method. The purpose is to eliminate the influence of situation representation of affirmative sentences to the direction activation and to explore whether the directional element is activated while verb is understanding and whether it's automatic and non-politic.The research indicated: 1) There will also be the Action Sentence Compatibility Effect during comprehending simple sentences including abstract verb. The directional representation activated timely during comprehending abstract verb affected the execution of action. 2) The activation of direction element represented by abstract verb is automatic and non-politic. It will emerge spontaneously without sentence situation.