Language-based access to gestural components of conceptual knowledge

Abstract

We report two experiments in which production of articulated hand gestures was used to reveal the nature of gestural knowledge evoked by sentences referring to manipulable objects. Two gesture types were examined: functional gestures (executed when using an object for its intended purpose) and volumetric gestures (used when picking up an object simply to move it). Participants read aloud a sentence that referred to an object but did not mention any form of manual interaction (e.g., Jane forgot the calculator) and were cued after a delay of 300 or 750 ms to produce the functional or volumetric gesture associated with the object, or a gesture that was unrelated to the object. At both cue delays, functional gestures were primed relative to unrelated gestures, but no significant priming was found for volumetric gestures. Our findings elucidate the types of motor representations that are directly linked to the meaning of words referring to manipulable objects in sentences.

Keywords:

• Action representations
• Embodied cognition
• Sentence comprehension.

Acknowledgments

The first two authors made equal contributions to the work reported here. This research was supported by discovery grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Michael Masson and to Daniel Bub and by a grant from the Perceptual Expertise Network, which is funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. The experiments were part of a Bachelor of Arts honours thesis submitted by Meaghan Newton-Taylor to the University of Victoria. We are grateful to Marnie Jedynak for assistance in conducting the experiments.

Notes

¹ We also obtained completion time data for each trial in both experiments, in addition to response latency. Completion time was recorded using a device that detected the participant's initial contact with the response apparatus. An analysis of completion times produced the same pattern of results for the combined data set as did the reported analysis for response latency. We have found completion time data generally to be more variable than latency data and therefore prefer the latter for the sake of providing more powerful statistical tests of effects.