On the roles of form systematicity and sensorimotor effects in language processing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Grounded cognition theories propose sensorimotor simulation during language processing.
• Body-Object Interaction (BOI) ratings measure the perceived physical interaction with objects.
• Form systematicity quantifies nonarbitrary phonological-syntactic mappings in language.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between BOI ratings and form systematicity.
• To determine which measure better predicts performance in various language processing tasks.
• To test predictions of embodied/grounded cognition theories.

Main Methods:

• Principal components analysis to examine shared variance between BOI and form systematicity.
• Predictive modeling using BOI and form systematicity on data from multiple lexical decision and object naming tasks.
• Analysis of performance across the English Lexicon Project, Auditory English Lexicon Project, English Crowdsourcing Project, Calgary Semantic Decision Project, and LinguaPix megastudy.

Main Results:

• BOI and form systematicity load on a common component, suggesting related information.
• Form systematicity was a stronger predictor of performance in most tasks (ELP, AELP, ECP, LinguaPix).
• BOI was a stronger predictor in one task (CSDP), suggesting task-specific engagement.

Conclusions:

• Nonarbitrary statistical relationships between word form and meaning are accessed automatically during language processing.
• Sensorimotor simulation mechanisms are engaged primarily when explicitly required by the task.
• Findings challenge strong interpretations of embodied cognition and inform neuroimaging data analysis in word recognition.