Mental Simulation of Implied Orientation Information in Chinese Sentences

The traditional theory amodal symbol system was challenged by Barsalou’s Perceptual Symbol System theory. The Perceptual Symbol System theory indicates that perceptual symbols will be mentally simulated and automatically activated in the human brain in the process of language comprehension. Based on this theory, many empirical studies have provided evidence for mental simulation during language comprehension. However, object orientation, a critical part of perceptual information, has received less attention compared to other visual object attributes such as shape, color, and size. Furthermore, most studies in this field focused on English and other Indo-European languages, and the less research focused on Chinese to demonstrate the effectiveness of mental simulation. Therefore, the current paper aims to explore the mental simulation of object orientation information and its relationship with mental imagery in Chinese sentence comprehension. The classic sentence-picture recognition task was employed in the present research. Results showed that participants’ responses were more accurate and faster in the match condition than in the mismatch condition and in the vertical direction task than in the horizontal direction task. Additionally, the results of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire showed no significant correlation between mental simulation and mental imagery. Therefore, it can be concluded that in the process of Chinese sentence comprehension, the human brain activates the perceptual symbol of the object orientation information and conducts corresponding mental simulation. The findings agree with the Perceptual Symbol System theory and provide further empirical evidence for the mental simulation of sentence comprehension and embodied cognition.