Embodied Cognition and Language: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

This proposed Special Issue of Languages invites papers from researchers who are broadly interested in the topic of language and embodied cognition. Papers can be empirical or theoretical in nature, and may address any question related to the role of embodiment in language and cognitive processing in individuals belonging to different populations.

Increasingly, the conventional notion that language and cognitive processing involve the manipulation of amodal symbols has been challenged by claims that “the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social nature” (Lakoff 1987, p. xiv). Theories of “embodied” or “grounded” cognition differ in many ways (Bergen 2015; Soylu 2016), but generally examine the connection between bodily and cognitive states, or focus on the extent to which cognition involves the reenactment of perceptual, motor, and introspective states gained through experience (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Barsalou 2008). From this perspective, language understanding involves activating sensorimotor information associated with the concepts underlying concrete expressions, as well as abstract expressions (Fernandino et al. 2015), whose meanings are understood via metaphoric extension from concrete conceptual domains (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Gibbs 2006). For instance, in a study by Glenberg and Kaschak (2002), participants judged whether sentences were sensible by making a movement towards or away from their bodies. Participants had more difficulty responding to sentences that implied action in a particular direction (e.g., “close the door” implying movement away from the body) that was opposite to the direction of their own movement (e.g., towards the body) compared to sentences implying a direction consistent with the bodily action (e.g., “open the door”). Mental simulation has also been proposed to influence the comprehension of figurative uses of motion verbs. For instance, reading a story involving fast travel, short distances, or easy terrains reduced participants’ response times in making a decision about a fictive motion sentence (e.g., “the road runs along the coast”) versus a non-fictive motion sentence (e.g., “the road is in the valley”) (Matlock 2004).

A substantial body of work from behavioral and neuroimaging studies has investigated the role of perceptual, emotional, or motor information on language and other higher-level cognitive processes (Bergen 2012; Galetzka 2017). The findings from prior research provide support for the claim that sensorimotor information plays a role in language and conceptual processing. However, there are many open questions about how our bodily interactions with, and perceptions of, the world impact our mind. For instance, what is the nature of the role of modality-specific representations in conceptual processing? Some researchers take the strong position that sensorimotor information is constitutive of most, if not all, conceptual representations, whereas others allow for the possibility of modality-specific as well as amodal representations of concepts, a position that may not be distinct from "disembodied" approaches to cognition (Mahon 2015). Another important issue needing to be addressed that is relevant to the embodied/disembodied cognition approach is linguistic diversity. The ways in which languages lexicalize aspects of our experience of the world differ widely. If all aspects of language are grounded to body, how should we account for such diversity in language? Are meanings that are universally coded in words also more embodied? There has been relatively little work investigating populations other than monolingual speakers of Indo-European languages; further research is also required to investigate how embodied cognition develops in child and adult learners of different languages, and the implications of the embodied approach for assessing and treating individuals with language disorders (see discussions in Bergen and Feldman 2008; Wellsby and Pexman 2014; Adams 2016; Cardona 2017). The proposed volume will address this research gap by inviting contributions from researchers working in different languages, as well as different populations, including children, bilinguals and second language learners, and atypically-developing individuals.

Abstract submissions, due 30 March 2018, will be solicited from researchers in psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and theoretical, corpus, and computational linguistics who investigate the interface between language and cognition. Completed manuscripts will be due by 15 July 2018. All papers will undergo peer review and will be published immediately upon acceptance. No article processing costs will be imposed on papers submitted in 2018.

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license which allows free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in Languages. The published material can be freely re-used provided that proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given. Authors can also post a PDF of their paper immediately after publication. The manuscripts submitted to this Special Issue might be eligible for the 2018 Languages Best Paper Award.

References

• Adams, Ashley M. 2016. How Language Is Embodied in Bilinguals and Children with Specific Language Impairment. Frontiers in Psychology 7:1209.
• Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2008. Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59: 617–45.
• Bergen, Benjamin K. 2012. Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books.
• Bergen, Benjamin K. 2015. Embodiment, simulation, and meaning. In The Routledge Handbook of Semantics. Edited by Nick Riemer. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 142–57.
• Bergen, Benjamin K., and Feldman, Jerome A. 2008. Embodied Concept Learning. In Handbook of Cognitive Science: An Embodied Approach. Edited by Paco Calvo and Toni Gomila. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 313–32.
• Cardona, Juan F. 2017. Embodied Cognition: A Challenging Road for Clinical Neuropsychology. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 9: 1–5.
• Fernandino, Leonardo, Jeffrey R. Binder, Rutvik H. Desai, Suzanne L. Pendl, Colin J. Humphries, William L. Gross, Lisa L. Conant, and Mark S. Seidenberg. Concept Representation Reflects Multimodal Abstraction: A Framework for Embodied Semantics. Cerebral Cortex 26: 2018–34.
• Galetzka, Cedric. 2017. The Story So Far: How Embodied Cognition Advances Our Understanding of Meaning-Making. Frontiers in Psychology 8: 1315.
• Gibbs Raymond W. JR. Metaphor Interpretation as Embodied Simulation. Mind & Language 21: 434–58.
• Glenberg, Arthur M., and Michael P. Kaschak. 2002. Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9: 558–65.
• Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Lakoff, George., and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books.
• Mahon, Bradford Z. The burden of embodied cognition. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 69: 172–78.
• Matlock, Teenie. 2004. Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory & Cognition 32: 1389–1400.
• Soylu, Firat. 2016. An embodied approach to understanding: Making sense of the world through simulated bodily activity. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1914.
• Wellsby, Michele, and Penny M. Pexman. 2014. Developing embodied cognition: insights from children’s concepts and language processing. Frontiers in Psychology 5: 506.

Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.