Out of Action? – Re-evaluating Methodological Challenges in Embodied Semantics Research
Contrasting with disembodied theories of the mind, the Embodied Semantics Approach proposes that meaning inevitably needs to be grounded in action and perception. Over the last twenty years, an impressive body of evidence has been put forward in its favour. Particularly the seemingly highly reliable Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE), suggesting a congruency effect between an overt action and the action implied by a sentence, does now seem to be an agreed-upon fact of psycholinguistic research. Similarly, response time effects associated with important semantic psycholinguistic variables such as concreteness and valence have frequently been explained through the embodied grounding of semantic representations. This dissertation presents a series of challenges to apparent certainties: Whereas the theoretical discussion emphasises the need to overcome the sharp dichotomies between embodied and disembodied perspectives on cognition, Embodied and Associationist Accounts of semantics, as well as modal and amodal representations, the empirical section outlines shortcomings of different behavioural and neuroimaging approaches to the investigation of Embodied Semantics Theories, particularly in relation to the causal involvement of action, perception, and emotion systems. Even more crucially, the ACE as a key finding of the Embodied Semantics Approach as well as valence and concreteness effects have encountered serious replication issues in recent years (e.g. Papesh, 2015; Morey at al., 2022; Kousta et al., 2009; Brysbaert et al., 2016). The experimental part of this dissertation therefore considers possible design-related explanations for the observed challenges concerning these behavioural paradigms. Experiment 1 investigates whether overlapping and therefore potentially conflicting temporal and action information embodied on the same back–front spatial axis in the ACE paradigm could contribute to previous replication problems. Experiment 2 emphasises the vastly varying nature of the congruent condition of previous studies concerning the differential contribution of the effector and spatial information to the ACE, whereas Experiments 3 and 4 examine the potential influence of individual differences (Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS)) on the successful replication of these well-known effects. However, the evidence for the ACE as well as valence and concreteness effects remains weak. Are embodiment effects such as the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect indeed out of action? Implications for Embodied Semantics Theories will be discussed.
Embodied Semantics, Language Processing, Psycholinguistics, Embodied Language Processing, Replication Crisis, Action Language, Grounded Language Processing
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