Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T04:54:18.990Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Interfering ACE on comprehending embodied meaning in action-related Chinese counterfactual sentences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2019

HUILI WANG
Affiliation:
Institute for Language and Cognition, School of Foreign Languages, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
XIAOLI YAN*
Affiliation:
Institute for Language and Cognition, School of Foreign Languages, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
SHUO CAO
Affiliation:
Institute for Language and Cognition, School of Foreign Languages, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
LINXI LI
Affiliation:
Institute for Language and Cognition, School of Foreign Languages, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
ADA KRITIKOS
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of Queensland St Lucia, Australia
*
*Address for correspondence: Xiaoli Yan: e-mail: xiaoliy@aliyun.com

Abstract

The present study explores whether embodied meaning is activated in comprehension of action-related Mandarin counterfactual sentences. Participants listened to action-related Mandarin factual or counterfactual sentences describing transfer events (actions towards or away from the participant), and then performed verb-compatible or -incompatible motor action after a transfer verb (action towards or away from the participant) onset. The results demonstrated that motor simulation, specifically the interfering action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE), was obtained in both factual and counterfactual sentences. Additionally, the temporal course of motor resonance was slightly different between factual and counterfactual sentences. We concluded that embodied meaning was activated in action-related Chinese counterfactual sentences. The results supported a neural network model of Chersi, Thill, Ziemke, and Borghi (2010), proposed within the embodiment approach, which explains the interaction between processing action-related sentences and motor performance. Moreover, we speculated that the neural network model of Chersi et al. was also applicable to action-related Mandarin counterfactual comprehension.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

The research was supported by the Research Funds for the School of International Education at Dalian University of Technology (Grant No. SIE18RZD1) and the Key Project of the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China (Grant No. DUT18RW212).

References

references

Azizzadeh, L., Wilson, S. M., Rizzolatti, G. & Iacoboni, M. (2006). Congruent embodied representations for visually presented actions and linguistic phrases describing actions. Current Biology 16(18), 18181823.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Au, T. K. (1983). Chinese and English counterfactuals: the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis revisited. Cognition 15(1): 155187.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barbey, A. K., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J. (2009). Structured event complexes in the medial prefrontal cortex support counterfactual representations for future planning. Philosophical Transactions Biological Sciences 364(1521), 12911300.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59(1), 617645.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barsalou, L. W., Kyle, W. S., Barbey, A. K. & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(2), 8491.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Binder, J. R. & Desai, R. H. (2011). The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(11), 527536.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, A. H. (1981). The linguistic shaping of thought: a study in the impact of language on thinking in China and the west. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Bonini, L., Rozzi, S., Serventi, F. U., Simone, L., Ferrari, P. F. & Fogassi, L. (2010). Ventral premotor and inferior parietal cortices make distinct contribution to action organization and intention understanding. Cerebral Cortex 20(6), 13721385.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borreggine, K. L. & Kaschak, M. P. (2006). The action-sentence compatibility effect: it’s all in the timing. Cognitive Science 30(6), 10971112.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boulenger, V., Roy, A. C., Paulignan, Y., Deprez, V., Jeannerod, M. & Nazir, T. A. (2006). Cross-talk between language processes and overt motor behavior in the first 200 msec of processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18(10), 16071615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brass, M., Bekkering, H. & Prinz, W. (2001). Movement observation affects movement execution in a simple response task. Acta Psychologica 106(1/2), 322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buccino, G., Riggio, L., Melli, G., Binkofski, F., Gallese, V. & Rizzolatti, G. (2005). Listening to action-related sentences modulates the activity of the motor system: a combined tms and behavioral study. Cognitive Brain Research 24(3), 355363.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byrne, R. M. J. (2002). Mental models and counterfactual thoughts about what might have been. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(10), 426431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrne, R. M. (2007). Précis of The rational imagination: how people create alternatives to reality. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 30(5/6), 439453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, G. H. (1988). A comparison between English and Chinese hypothetical conditionals. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 1, 1018.Google Scholar
Chersi, F., Thill, S., Ziemke, T. & Borghi, A. M. (2010). Sentence processing: linking language to motor chains. Frontiers in Neurorobotics 4, 19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Damasio, A. R. (1989). Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: a systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition. Cognition 33(1/2), 2562.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Vega, M., Moreno, V. & Castillo, D. (2011). The comprehension of action-related sentences may cause interference rather than facilitation on matching actions. Psychological Research 77(1), 2030.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Vega, M. & Urrutia, M. (2011). Counterfactual sentences activate embodied meaning: an action–sentence compatibility effect study. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 23(8), 962973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, H. J. & Sanford, A. J. (2008). Anomalies in real and counterfactual worlds: an eye-movement investigation. Journal of Memory & Language 58(3), 609626.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, M. H. & Zwaan, R. A. (2008). Embodied language: a review of the role of the motor system in language comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(6), 825850.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fogassi, L., Ferrari, P. F., Gesierich, B., Rozzi, S., Chersi, F. & Rizzolatti, G. (2005). Parietal lobe: from action organization to intention understanding. Science 308(5722), 662667.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, V. (2008). Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: the neural exploitation hypothesis. Social Neuroscience 3(3/4), 317333.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbs, R. W. (2006). Metaphor interpretation as embodied simulation. Mind & Language 21(3), 434458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glenberg, A. M. & Kaschak, M. P. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9(3), 558565.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hauk, O., Johnsrude, I. & Pulvermüller, F. (2004). Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron 41(2), 301307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaschak, M. P. & Borreggine, K. L. (2008). Temporal dynamics of the action-sentence compatibility effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61, 883895.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jiang, Y. (2000). Counterfactual interpretations of Chinese conditionals. Studies and Explorations on Syntax (Chinese) 10, 257279.Google Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P. N. & Byrne, R. M. (2002). Conditionals: a theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference. Psychological Review 109(4), 646678.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Liu, L. G. (1985). Reasoning counterfactually in Chinese: Are there any obstacles? Cognition 21(3), 239270.Google ScholarPubMed
Markman, K., Suhr, J. A. & Klein, W. M. P. (2012). Handbook of imagination and mental simulation. Innovation in Language Learning & Teaching 23(3), 256261.Google Scholar
Papesh, M. H. (2015). Just out of reach: on the reliability of the action-sentence compatibility effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 144(6), e116e141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pulvermüller, F. (2005). Brain mechanisms linking language and action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6(7), 576582.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Qian, Y. A. (2016) Corpus-based study of counterfactuals in Mandarin. Language and Linguistics 17(6), 891915.Google Scholar
Roese, N. J. (1997). Counterfactual thinking. Psychological Bulletin 121(1), 133148.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Santamaría, C., Espino, O. & Byrne, R. M. J. (2005). Counterfactual and semifactual conditionals prime alternative possibilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31(5), 11491154.Google ScholarPubMed
Santana, E. & de Vega, M. (2011). Metaphors are embodied, and so are their literal counterparts. Frontiers in Psychology 2(4), 112. doi=10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00090CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sato, M., Mengarelli, M., Riggio, L., Gallese, V. & Buccino, G. (2008). Task related modulation of the motor system during language processing. Brain & Language 105(2), 8390.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schuil, K. D. I., Smits, M. & Zwaan, R. A. (2013). Sentential context modulates the involvement of the motor cortex in action language processing: an fMRI study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7(1), 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shao, J. (1988). Linguistic diversity and ideational diversity: a review of the study of Chinese and English counterfactuals. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 1, 29.Google Scholar
Tettamanti, M., Buccino, G., Saccuman, M. C., Gallese, V., Danna, M., Scifo, P. & Perani, D. (2005). Listening to action-related sentences activates fronto-parietal motor circuits. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17(2), 273281.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thompson, V. A. & Byrne, R. M. J. (2002). Reasoning counterfactually: making inferences about things that didn’t happen. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 28(6), 11541170.Google ScholarPubMed
Wang, C. H. (2016). The accessible factors of counterfactual meaning of Chinese conditionals: a composite system. Chinese Language Learning 1, 1220.Google Scholar
Winer, B. J. (1971). Statistical principles in experimental design (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Yuan, Y. L. (2015). Conterfactual expressions in Chinese and the distinctive thinking they reflect. Chinese Journal of Social Science 8, 126144.Google Scholar
Zhuo, J. S. (2017). What are they good for? A constructionist account of counterfactuals in ordinary Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 113, 3052.Google Scholar
Zwaan, R. A. & Taylor, L. J. (2006). Seeing, acting, understanding: motor resonance in language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology 135(1), 111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed