Indirect Grounding Of Novel Concepts In Chinese

The conceptual knowledge system serves as a foundation for not only guaranteeing that human can successfully interact with the outside world,but also for extracting the meaning of words.In terms of the criterion of whether the conceptual representation is modal or not,the various theoretical perspectives can be divided into two camps: Amodal Symbol Theory and Embodied Cognition Theory.Amodal Symbol Theory holds that concepts are amodal in nature,independent of perceptual and motor systems.The general view of Embodied Cognition Theory holds that concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience,which has two levels of interpretation: 1)concepts inherently retain the sensorimotor experience arising from the interaction between body and environment,as a result,they are modal;2)concept extraction entails the reactivation of sensorimotor experience.A growing body of research suggests that concepts are related to their direct experience of their corresponding referents,providing strong evidence for Embodied Cognition Theory.However,it is previously shown that humans usually acquire new concepts only through language,which challenges the extensibility of Embodied Cognition.Based on Embodied Cognition Theory,the present study designed two behavioral experiments using a Stroop-like paradigm,aiming to investigate the symbolic grounding of Chinese novel concepts whose referents are not directly experienced.Participants were all college students whose mother tongue was Chinese.The experimental materials were based on 8 novel concepts combined from existing concepts,4 of which implied vertical spatial information related to “up”(e.g.,make-up hat)and 4 of which implied vertical spatial information related to “down”(e.g.,Bluetooth sock).The procedure of Experiment 1 was as follows: 1)in the learning phase,participants learned the meaning of novel concepts through language descriptions;2)in the test phase,participants were required to judge the plausibility of the stimulus sentences containing novel concepts by upward or downward keystroke response.Experiment 2 followed the same procedure as Experiment 1,and replaced the novel concepts in the stimulus sentences with pseudowords that did not carry any spatial information themselves as labels to exclude the effect of existing concepts(e.g.,hat,sock)on the experimental results.The results of reaction time and accuracy revealed that the significant action-sentence compatibility effects(ACE)arose throughout the test phase,i.e.,participants exhibited faster response times and greater accuracy rates when the direction of movement was compatible with the vertical location implied by the novel concepts in the stimulus sentences,and vice versa.To sum up,the results suggest that in language comprehension tasks,novel concepts purely acquired through language are associated with the sensorimotor system,i.e.,grounding is achieved for concepts without direct experience,and it is done indirectly through the sensorimotor experience of previously acquired concepts.From the perspective of the grounding of Chinese novel concepts,this study further confirms and extends the embodied cognitive view of language comprehension.Even though the novel concept constructed purely through language has no direct experience of interacting with the real world,the process of its comprehension also involves the activation of sensorimotor experiences and the construction of mental simulations,thus providing indirect bridges to sensorimotor grounding.