Based on two research objectives, following research questions will be answered:
(1) Does the embodied effect occur in comprehending Chinese action-verb metaphors?
(2) If it does, is the effect the same as other alphabetic languages in the comprehension of action-verb metaphors?
2 Literature Review
2.1 Embodied Theories of Language Comprehension
Dating back to the Cognitive Revolution in 1970s, Amodal Symbol Model (ASM), one of the most representative theories in amodal view of language processing, has been the main point of the first generation of cognition for more than five decades. ASM is in contrast with the embodied view and denies the contribution of sensorimotor systems. ASM holds an arbitrary relationship between an abstract symbol and its referent. More concisely, ASM claims that language comprehension consists of abstract, amodal and arbitrary symbols [6, 7]. Taking the word “cat” as an example, “abstract” indicates a kind of animal having soft fur, a short snout and retractile claws; “amodal” represents that the same word “cat” can be used in the spoken mode or the written mode and “arbitrary” indicates that the relationship between the word “cat” and the referents is arbitrary because phonemic and orthographic features of the word “cat” bear no relationship to the characteristics of “cat” in reality. To comprehend the word “cat”, people should process amodal characteristics of “cat”, without capturing or retrieving the relevant perceptual and motor experiences. On the ground of ASM, our mind works as a computer without the involvement of sensorimotor systems during language processing, because language meaning is completely divorced from our mind and bodily experiences. In a word, conceptual representations consist of abstract, amodal and arbitrary symbols, which are automatically updated based on the newly input information. Moreover, in semantic representations, relationships between words and referents are totally symbolic and arbitrary.
Although the traditional view of language comprehension occupies an important and dominant position in cognitive science, the traditional view cannot explain some grounding problems. For instance, when two foreigners talk with each other, they may add some bodily movements and gestures during the talk. What’s worse, a foreigner who cannot speak Chinese proficiently in China may have troubles in some cases. They may try to understand unfamiliar words with interpretations offered by the dictionary. Unfortunately, if they have any difficulty in these interpretations, they need to look up new interpretations, which may lead to the endless interpretations.
2.2 The Embodied Effect in Action-related Language Processing
Substantial consolidated researches in action-related language have supported that action words and sentences recruit sensorimotor information the same as the performance of these actions [9, 33-35], suggesting that bidirectional effects between motor execution&nb
