ABSTRACT
The authors argue that brains evolved to control action, and, as suggested by M. Montessori (1967), a successful theory of cognition and its application will require recognition of that fact. The indexical hypothesis, an embodied account of language comprehension, posits that language is understood by simulating the actions that underlie sentence meaning and that reading comprehension can be improved by ensuring that this simulation occurs. Accordingly, first-and second-grade children manipulated toys (e.g., animals on a toy farm) to correspond to sentences in the stories that they were reading. Compared with children in a reread control group, manipulation improved memory and comprehension by almost 2 standard deviations. Similar improvements were found when the children were instructed to imagine the manipulation. In another experiment, manipulation and imagined manipulation produced a large increase in the ability of 3rd-grade children to solve some (but not all) mathematical story problems.
