Mental Simulation in Spatial Language Processing

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental simulations (Barsalou 1999a) of the content of utterances (Barsalou 1999b, Stanfield and Zwaan 2001, Zwaan et al. 2002, Richardson et al. 2003, Bergen et al. 2003, Narayanan et al. 2004, Bergen et al. 2004). These simulations can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain unexplored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements, e.g. verbs, nouns, etc., can trigger mental simulations? And third, how detailed are the visual simulations being performed? This paper presents findings pertaining to each of these questions, using a visual object categorization task that investigated whether upor down-related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same part of the visual field (following Richardson et al 2003). Specifically, it finds that either subject nouns or main verbs can trigger visual imagery, but only when used in literal sentences about real space metaphorical language does not yield significant effects. This imagery is detailed as to the part of the visual field where the described scene would take place.