TY - CHAP

T1 - Embodied language comprehension: the processing of spatial information during reading and listening

AU - Claus, Berry

AU - Kelter, Stephanie

PY - 2009

Y1 - 2009

N2 - In recent years, embodied theories of language comprehension have gained increasing importance. A core assumption of these theories is that the representations being constructed during language comprehension recruit the same modality-specific mental subsystems as representations being constructed during action and perception. This common-systems assumption is supported by an impressive number of recent findings. The first part of this chapter provides a review of this research. However, most studies investigated the comprehension of isolated sentences or words under rather artificial conditions. The second part of this chapter focuses on a hypothesis that follows from the common-systems assumption and that concerns the difference between reading and listening in natural language comprehension. The common-systems assumption implies that the comprehension of spatial information about described situations is affected by the modality of the linguistic input. If it is true that representations of described situations and representations of real, directly experienced situations share the same modality-specific mental subsystems, then reading, as compared with listening, can be expected to be disadvantageous with regard to representing spatial information about a described situation. Reading involves the control of eye movements, and this requires the processing of spatial information from the reader's real situation. Thus, reading draws on the resources of the spatial subsystems and should therefore interfere with the processing of linguistically conveyed spatial information. In short, this Reading-Interference Hypothesis assumes that reading, as opposed to listening, hampers the construction and maintenance of spatial representations of described situations. We demonstrate that this hypothesis provides a framework for integrating numerous seemingly inconsistent results from text-comprehension research on the representation of visuospatial information. Furthermore, we report a series of experiments that we conducted to directly investigate the validity of the Reading-Interference Hypothesis. In three experiments, participants either read or listened to narratives. There were two versions of the narratives that differed with regard to visuospatial information about the described situation. A probe-recognition task was used to tap the participants’ spatial representations. The results support the Reading-Interference Hypothesis. Probe-recognition latencies were significantly affected by the spatial manipulation with listening, but not with reading, suggesting that the readers did not construct sufficiently detailed spatial representations of the described situations.

AB - In recent years, embodied theories of language comprehension have gained increasing importance. A core assumption of these theories is that the representations being constructed during language comprehension recruit the same modality-specific mental subsystems as representations being constructed during action and perception. This common-systems assumption is supported by an impressive number of recent findings. The first part of this chapter provides a review of this research. However, most studies investigated the comprehension of isolated sentences or words under rather artificial conditions. The second part of this chapter focuses on a hypothesis that follows from the common-systems assumption and that concerns the difference between reading and listening in natural language comprehension. The common-systems assumption implies that the comprehension of spatial information about described situations is affected by the modality of the linguistic input. If it is true that representations of described situations and representations of real, directly experienced situations share the same modality-specific mental subsystems, then reading, as compared with listening, can be expected to be disadvantageous with regard to representing spatial information about a described situation. Reading involves the control of eye movements, and this requires the processing of spatial information from the reader's real situation. Thus, reading draws on the resources of the spatial subsystems and should therefore interfere with the processing of linguistically conveyed spatial information. In short, this Reading-Interference Hypothesis assumes that reading, as opposed to listening, hampers the construction and maintenance of spatial representations of described situations. We demonstrate that this hypothesis provides a framework for integrating numerous seemingly inconsistent results from text-comprehension research on the representation of visuospatial information. Furthermore, we report a series of experiments that we conducted to directly investigate the validity of the Reading-Interference Hypothesis. In three experiments, participants either read or listened to narratives. There were two versions of the narratives that differed with regard to visuospatial information about the described situation. A probe-recognition task was used to tap the participants’ spatial representations. The results support the Reading-Interference Hypothesis. Probe-recognition latencies were significantly affected by the spatial manipulation with listening, but not with reading, suggesting that the readers did not construct sufficiently detailed spatial representations of the described situations.

M3 - Contribution to book/anthology

SP - 1

EP - 44

BT - Advances in Psychology Research, Vol. 59

A2 - Columbus, Alexandra M.

ER -