ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, the debate regarding embodied versus symbolic representations in language comprehension has dominated areas within the cognitive sciences (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg, 1997; Kintsch, 1998; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Landauer & Dumais, 1997). At the center of the debate is the question of whether language comprehension is primarily symbolic or whether it is fundamentally linked to embodied (perceptual and motor) mechanisms. Advocates of either side of the spectrum have polemically presented their views (Barsalou, 1999; Fodor, 1980; Glenberg & Robertson, 2000; Harnad, 1990; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Pylyshyn, 1984; Searle, 1980). These discussions often give the impression that language comprehension involves either symbol processing or embodied simulation. The current study replaces this with the question to what extent language comprehension is symbolic and embodied. It is hard to imagine that logical reasoning or mathematics could exist without any form of symbolic processing. At the same time, it is hard to imagine how visual rotation and spatial orientation tasks can operate without any form of perceptual processing. It is therefore very likely that symbolic and embodied processes go together in language
comprehension. This study will therefore not adopt an eliminative view1
(Goldstone & Barsalou, 1998) that rules out a symbolic (or for that matter embodied) representation, but instead will adopt an integrative view that assumes some relationship exists between language and perception. The nature of the relationship between embodied and symbolic representations thereby is the central question. This study will argue for symbol interdependency, a dependency of symbols on other symbols and dependency of symbols on embodied experiences. The mechanism behind symbol interdependency can be represented by statistical models like latent semantic analysis.
