Experimental methods for simulation semantics

Abstract

. Simulation semantics and language understanding How do people understand language? Though vital to the study of language and the mind, a disproportionately small body of empirical work has historically addressed this question. Research on language understanding presumably falls under the purview of cognitive lin-guistics, the study of the mind and language, but cognitive linguistics has predominantly produced static, verbal models of linguistic and other conceptual representations, rather than the dynamic models of psychological processing required to explain the processes of language understanding. At the same time, empirical psycholinguistics, whose exper-imental methods could in principle yield profound insights into the question, has shied away from deep language understanding, preferring to stick to more easily measurable and manipulable aspects of language – principally aspects of linguistic form like syntax and phonology. However, a number of lines of research have recently emerged, which wed psycholinguistic techniques with a cognitive linguistic perspective on language knowl-edge and use. This work introduces a new, integrated field, which focuses on the idea that language understanding is contingent upon the understander mentally simulating, or imagining, the content of utterances. This simulation-based view of meaning grows out of theories of language and the mind in which “embodiment ” plays a central role. The idea of embodiment in cognitive