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Verbs, events and spatial representations.
A Chatterjee1, M H Southwood, D Basilico
1Department of Neurology, The University of Alabama at Birmingham 35294-0017, USA. a_chatterjee@email.neuro.uab.edu
Neuropsychologia
|April 24, 1999
Summary
Language concepts are spatially represented. Participants located agents left of patients and showed left-to-right action directionality, suggesting spatial event representations beyond propositional meaning.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Linguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Language describes events with actions and spatial trajectories.
- Previous research suggests potential spatial underpinnings for conceptual representation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether linguistic concepts of events are spatially represented.
- To examine the spatial location of thematic roles and directionality of actions in event representation.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments were conducted using drawing and sentence-picture matching tasks.
- Verbs like 'push' and 'pull' were used to dissociate action directionality.
- Sentence structure was controlled to isolate meaning-based spatial biases.
Main Results:
- Normal subjects consistently located agents to the left of patients.
- A left-to-right directionality was observed in the representation of actions.
- These spatial biases were not explained by language surface structure or propositional representations.
Conclusions:
- Events possess spatial representations alongside their propositional counterparts (verbs, thematic roles).
- Observed spatial properties may be linked to left hemisphere functional specialization.
- Findings support a deeper integration of language, cognition, and spatial processing.