
The Activation of the representation of subject’s profession feature and action during language comprehension
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2012, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (6) : 1282-1288.
The Activation of the representation of subject’s profession feature and action during language comprehension
Three experiments were designed to explore the activation of the representation of subject’s profession feature and action during language comprehension. Experiment 1 explored the activation of the subjects’ profession feature during the comprehension of the sentences which are in the pattern of “the person who does something is ……”, and Experiment 2 further explored the problem in “somebody does something……”. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to recognize the pictures through mouth instead of hands. To integrate the result of experiment 1, Experiment 3a explored the activation of the representation of the action performer during the comprehension of the sentences “the person who does something is ……”and whether the representation of profession feature will be activated at the same time. Experiment 3b explored the activation of the representation of the action performer during the comprehension of the sentences “somebody does something ……”and whether the representation of profession feature will be activated at the same time. The conclusions can be summarized as follows: The representation of subjects’ profession feature is activated during the comprehension of the sentences which are in the pattern of “the person who does something is ……”, while comprehending the sentences “somebody does something”, the representation of subjects’ profession feature is activated only when the participants’ performer is in accordance with the action performer in the sentence. The representation of the action performer is activated during the process of comprehending sentences which is in the pattern of “the person who does something is……”, while in the sentences “somebody does something”, the representation of the action performer is obviously activated only when the profession described in the sentence is in accordance with that in the picture. Both he representation of subjects’ profession feature and action performer are activated during the comprehension of sentences “the person who does something is ……”, while during the comprehension of sentences “who does something” , the occurrence of this phenomenon is affected by the matching of the other representation. While the other representation is in the matching condition, one representation can be activated at the same time, if not , no obvious activation .
embodied cognition / perceptual symbol theory / profession featuer / action
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