Perspective-Taking in Sentence Comprehension: Time and Empathy

Embodied sentence comprehension 1 EMBODIED SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

ions are being discussed in other chapters in this book (Barsalou & WiemerHastings, this volume; Gibbs, this volume; Prinz, this volume). 6.0 Conclusion and outlook We started this chapter by comparing two perspectives on cognition in general and on language comprehension in particular. According to the traditional perspective, language comprehension involves the activation and integration of d...

Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia

We show in this chapter that selective aphasic deficits dissociate distinct language processing systems. To this end, we focus on disruptions of lexical access that appear to implicate initial stages of sentence comprehension. The analyses we present turn on comparisons between agrammatic (Broca's) aphasic patients and paragrammatic (Wernicke's) aphasic patients. By the former we mean roughly, ...

Mental Simulation of Spatial Perspective during Sentence Comprehension

We present an experiment, in which the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE, Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002) was reversed when the perspective was changed by using first person pronouns as the agent or patient of the sentence. The results suggest that participants prefer to take the perspective of the first person protagonists – independent of their grammatical and semantic roles and the directi...

Sentence Comprehension as Mental Simulation: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

It has been argued that the mental representation resulting from sentence comprehension is not (just) an abstract symbolic structure but a “mental simulation” of the state-of-affairs described by the sentence. We present a particular formalization of this theory and show how it gives rise to quantifications of the amount of syntactic and semantic information conveyed by each word in a sentence....

Time in Narrative Comprehension: a Cognitive Perspective