Dynamic Representations Of Environment In Language Comprehension

Perceptual symbol system proposed by Barsalou is a new theory about representation of knowledge, its core viewpoint suppose that perceptual symbol is component of cognition. The theory is broadly used and gets many experimental supports in language comprehension. Based on this Zwaan proposed the immersed experiencer frame(IEF),which assumed that the comprehender was an immersed experiencer of the described situation and comprehension was the vicarious experience of the described events. So that environmental dynamic mental representation is the result of vision mode related of time and space on the base of human experience about environment.This research takes undergraduates as participants, uses sentence–picture verification task to explore static environmental and dynamic environmental mental representation. The research indicated: (1) the perceptual representation was dynamic in language comprehension. The representation for static environment finished at the earlier period, besides once formed it held stability and perdurability. The dynamic representation for dynamic environment finished at the evening period. (2) misty environment and clear environment were represented by constrain focal entity'properties, and representation for movement from one visibility to another visibility also employed the same mechanism: constraint satisfaction mechanism. (3)environmental dynamic representation did not strictly go along with the order of the reading, environment as background entity was represented with focal entity in participants'mind. In other words functional web activated by words was not one by one, but lap over one another.