Language comprehension is an amazing phenomenon. Sound waves hit your ears, or squiggles on a page impinge on your retina, and with no awareness of the processes that unfold, you end up with the impression of understanding events and worlds that you have never experienced before. How does this happen? For the past 50 years, the dominant view has been that language comprehension is fundamentally a process of abstract symbol manipulation, much like the way that variables are manipulated by computer programs. With funding from NSF, Rolf Zwaan and Michael Kaschak will investigate an alternative to the dominant view of language processing. They will conduct experiments to test the hypothesis that language comprehension makes use of the body's systems of perception and action planning. On this hypothesis, the actions and events described in language are understood as if the comprehender is actually experiencing them firsthand. For instance, when understanding a sentence such as, "The car approached you," it is hypothesized that comprehenders will recruit those components of their visual system that would be active if they were actually perceiving an approaching car, even though there is no car in the surrounding environment. This hypothesis will be tested by studying 1) the planning of perception and action during language comprehension, 2) the retrieval of perceptual and motor information from memory during language comprehension, and 3) the role of the body in comprehending language that describes the actions of other people.
