A Study On The Occurrence Of Propositional And Perceptional Symbol Representations In Lexical Processing

How knowledge is represented in our minds has long been a critical issue in thecognitive science history. As a traditional theory in knowledge representation, propositionalsymbol theory takes perception and cognition as two independent systems. Informationfrom sensory-motor system is transformed into a completely distinct type of propositionalsymbols in the brain. The non-perceptual symbols are the way how knowledge isrepresented. With the development of embodied philosophy and cognition, propositionalsymbol theory was come up with by Barsalou. Being the representative theory of cognitivescience in its second generation, it considers cognition as perceptual in nature. Cognitionand perception are composed by the same representation system. Besides, there is nospecific “meaning center” in the brain to store concepts, and concepts are represented in thesensory-motor system dispersedly. Our understanding of language is realized throughimitating actual sensory-motor activities.There are a large amount of evidence for the existence of both perceptual symbolrepresentation and propositional symbol representation. Currently, it is widely believed thatboth of them are involved in knowledge representation. As to their relationship, two theoriesare proposed, one being multiple semantic coding theory, and the other beinginterdependent-symbol assumption.Through controlling experiment tasks and presentation time of vocabularies, thispaper studied whether propositional and perceptual symbol representations are bothinvolved in lexical processing, their respective occurrence time (if yes to the first question),and the experiment task influence on them. Experiment1studied whether perceptualsymbol repression is involved in lexical judgment task, and if yes when; Experiment2explored whether propositional symbol repression is involved in lexical judgment task, andif yes when; Experiment3investigated the occurrence time of the two representations andtheir influence on each other in a shallow-semantic processing requirement task---characterpattern judgment.It is found that, first, both perceptual symbol representation and propositional symbol representation were involved in lexical processing task. Second, when the first word waspresented for150ms both of the two representations worked with the propositional symbolrepresentation more obvious, propositional symbol representation occurred when the firstword was presented for300ms; and perceptual symbol representation occurred when thefirst word was presented for650ms; they interacted with each other. Third, When the taskrequirements were different for material processing deepness, the activation degrees weredifferent for the two representations.