The Impact Of Different Person On The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect

According to the embodied cognition hypothesis, language comprehension involves comprehenders’ activation of perceptual schemata and motoric programs. Embodied understanding endows our cognitive activities such as action sentence processing with an actor’s perspective. But the results of researches on this view were not consistent. While some agreed, some did not. The bone of contention was during comprehending the sentences of a third person whether the comprehenders would still take an actor’s perspective.Here in this article we summarized and classified the experimental action sentences of the previous relevant researches into two types: sentences involved one protagonist and two protagonists. Additionally, we changed the person of the protagonists in the sentences, i.e., the first and third person. Thus we, using the classical ACE paradigm, designed four experiments to explore how the person of the protagonist in four different groups of sentences influenced the perspective taking of comprehenders’ mental simulation.Materials in the four experiments are all simple sentences involved toward/away actions. The participants in each experiment have to judge the sensibility of each sentence and response by moving their hands to press the key. When the direction implied in the sentence is same to the direction of the hands-moving, the participants make the response more quickly. This is called the action-sentence compatibility effect, which demonstrates that the action implied in a sentence can interfere with the comprehenders’ real action.The first three experiments adopted two-factor repeated measurement experimental design with the factors sentence direction(toward/away) and response direction(yes-is-near/yes-is-far); and the forth one adopted one-factor repeated measurement experimental design with the factor response direction(yes-is-near/yes-is-far). The results indicated during action sentences comprehension the comprehenders do not simulate the action from the actor’s perspective all the time. The perspective taking of the mental simulation depends on the person and the number of the protagonists in the action sentences. Especially during comprehending the sentences of a third person, when there is only one protagonist, this protagonist’s perspective is automatically adopted; when there is two or more protagonists, comprehenders simulate the action from the onlooker’s perspective. In summary, it is conditional for the hypothesis that the action-perspective taking of mental simulation is fixed on the actor’s perspective. This article has offered a precondition for this hypothesis, and somewhat resolved the disagreements of the past and benefited the future studies.