From Head to Toe: Embodiment Through Statistical Linguistic Frequencies - eScholarship (2012)

From Head to Toe: Embodiment Through Statistical Linguistic Frequencies Richard Tillman (r.tillman@memphis.edu) Department of Psychology / Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis 400 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN 38152 USA Vivek Datla (vvdatla@memphis.edu) Department of Computer Science / Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis 400 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN 38152 USA Sterling Hutchinson (schtchns@memphis.edu) Department of Psychology / Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis 400 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN 38152 USA Max Louwerse (mlouwerse@memphis.edu) Department of Psychology / Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis 400 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN 38152 USA Abstract Recent literature in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that cognition is fundamentally embodied. For instance, various studies have shown that semantic knowledge about the human body correlates with spatial body representations, suggesting that such knowledge is embodied in nature. An alternative explanation for this finding comes from the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis, which argues that perceptual information is encoded in language. We demonstrated that the findings that can be explained by an embodied cognition account can also be explained through statistical linguistic frequencies. Co-occurrence frequencies of names for common body parts correlated with experimental findings from adults and children. Moreover, the position of the body parts was predicted on the basis of statistical linguistic frequencies. These findings suggest that language encodes embodied information. Keywords: embodiment; statistical linguistic frequencies; symbolic cognition; embodied cognition; conceptual processing; symbol interdependency. Introduction Over the last decade the notion that cognition is fundamentally embodied has dominated the cognitive sciences (Glenberg, 1997; Goldstone, & Barsalou, 1998; Barsalou, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Zwaan, 2004; Pecher & Zwaan, 2005; Semin & Smith, 2008). The central argument in theories of embodied cognition is that our minds co-evolved with our bodies, especially the sensory motor system, and that cognitive processes therefore heavily rely on perceptual simulations. This argument is in sharp contrast with a computational symbolic approach to cognition. Views of symbolic cognition suggest that meaning can be derived from linguistic context (Landauer & Dumais, 1997). In other words, instead of mental reenactment, mental representations can be seen as internal structures of symbolic concepts and do not necessarily have a direct relation to perceptual states (Fodor, 1975; Pylyshyn, There is a large body of literature that finds evidence that cognition is embodied. Studies have shown that processing within modalities is faster than having to map across modalities (e.g., Marques, 2006; Pecher, Zeelenberg & Barsalou, 2003; Spence, Nicholls & Driver, 2000). Language comprehension seems to be influenced by action representations primed in experimental tasks (e.g., McCloskey, Klatzky, & Pellegrino, 1992; Zwaan, Stanfield & Yaxley, 2002), and visual representations get activated during language comprehension. Perceptual feature characteristics that have affected language comprehension include orientation (Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001), temporality (Zwaan, Madden & Whitten, 2000), visibility (Rapp & Horton, 2003), spatial configuration (Louwerse, 2008; Zwaan & Yaxley, 2003), modality (Louwerse & Connell, 2011; van Dantzig et al., 2008), direction (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Kaschak et al., 2005), or location (Setic & Domijan, 2007). Several embodied cognition studies have shown a relation between the meaning of words and their spatial configuration when presented on the screen. For instance, when words for concepts in the air, such as birds and insects, are presented in the upper half of a screen, participants respond faster than when the same words are presented in the bottom of the screen, with a reverse effect for words referring to concepts on land or in the ocean (Setic & Domijan, 2007; Pecher, Van Dantzig, Boot, Zanolie, & Huber, 2010). Similarly, when word pairs such as attic and basement are presented vertically, one above the other, iconic pairs are processed faster than reverse iconic pairs, presumably because comprehenders perceptually simulate the position of these concepts (Zwaan & Yaxley,