Embodied Experiences in SecondLanguage Learning of English Modal Verbs

One great debate in cognitive science rests upon the role of bodily experiences in information processing and knowledge representation, that is whether a human body provides the ground from which a higher form of human cognition arises. A longstanding view (e.g., Neisser, 1967) holds that mental representation is symbolic and abstract and that the human body is peripheral to an understanding of the nature of cognition. According to this view, once sensory inputs—linguistic, perceptual, olfactory, etc.—pass through a stage-based, feed-forward, modality-specific system, they are instantiated as abstract concepts in a processing unit, without traces of perceptual information or associative motor response (Barsalou, 2009). For example, a concept of DOG is simply registered as [CANINE, FOUR-LEGGED] independent of human subjective experiences and events in which we play with a dog or touch its fluffy hair (Gibbs, 2005, chapter 4; see also Croft & Cruse, 2004). In recent years, however, this so-called disembodied cognition thesis has come under intense scrutiny. Empirical evidence from psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science converges to suggest that human cognition is grounded (Robbins & Aydede, 2009). Chief among many claims of grounded cognition is the thesis that the human physical body and its interaction with the world ground human cognitive processes (Gibbs, 2005; see also Wilson, 2002). As a result, human conceptual knowledge is perceptual (Barsalou, 1999, 2008). In a concept formation process, an entity (i.e., object, event, or concept) is perceived and stored as a modality-specific perceptual symbol, in a form of an associative pattern of neural activation (see also Spivey, 2007). Presumably when a child first learns a concept of “chair,” for example, she begins to associate a chair with the affordances it provides (e.g., a surface to sit on), the haptic experience of rocking a chair, and so on. The perceptual states in the sensory-motor systems recruited during the interaction with the chair are stored in the perceptual symbol “chair. ” Multiple instances of the same perceptual symbol are linked together under a frame (i.e., a schematic referent of an entity.) The frame is then tied to a background concept (chair-furniture) (see Croft & Cruse, 2004 for a similar discussion of a profile-base relationship in Cognitive Linguistics). Over the course of childhood, language develops in conjunction with perceptual symbols (Smith & Gasser, 2005) and is used to index frames. When a perceptual symbol is retrieved, the brain performs a simulation, recruiting various sources of information from our bodily interaction with the environment (Barsalou, 2008). Much research has offered empirical evidence of bodily grounding of human cognitive processes. For example, participants were faster to evaluate a concept (e.g., LOVE or HATE) when it corresponded to the action participants performed (i.e., pulling or pushing a lever) (Chen & Bargh, 1999). In addition, handedness affected participants’ judgments. If right-handed, they regarded objects on their right as better than those on the left. Nonetheless, this effect was reversed when right-handed participants were trained to use their left hand (Casasanto & Chrysikou, 2011). A heavy object induced participants to perceive issues in front of them as highly important (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). In a similar vein, wearing a white lab coat—associated with being attentive and careful—can enhance performance on sustained and selective attention tasks (Adam & Galinsky, 2012). Results