Abstract:

Three experiments were designed to explore the activation of the representation of subject’s profession feature and action during language comprehension. Experiment 1 explored the activation of the subjects’ profession feature during the comprehension of the sentences which are in the pattern of “the person who does something is ……”, and Experiment 2 further explored the problem in “somebody does something……”. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to recognize the pictures through mouth instead of hands. To integrate the result of experiment 1, Experiment 3a explored the activation of the representation of the action performer during the comprehension of the sentences “the person who does something is ……”and whether the representation of profession feature will be activated at the same time. Experiment 3b explored the activation of the representation of the action performer during the comprehension of the sentences “somebody does something ……”and whether the representation of profession feature will be activated at the same time. The conclusions can be summarized as follows: The representation of subjects’ profession feature is activated during the comprehension of the sentences which are in the pattern of “the person who does something is ……”, while comprehending the sentences “somebody does something”, the representation of subjects’ profession feature is activated only when the participants’ performer is in accordance with the action performer in the sentence. The representation of the action performer is activated during the process of comprehending sentences which is in the pattern of “the person who does something is……”, while in the sentences “somebody does something”, the representation of the action performer is obviously activated only when the profession described in the sentence is in accordance with that in the picture. Both he representation of subjects’ profession feature and action performer are activated during the comprehension of sentences “the person who does something is ……”, while during the comprehension of sentences “who does something” , the occurrence of this phenomenon is affected by the matching of the other representation. While the other representation is in the matching condition, one representation can be activated at the same time, if not , no obvious activation .

Key words: embodied cognition, perceptual symbol theory, profession featuer, action

摘要：

运用句-配范式以及句子理解与身体反应相互作用的实验范式，探讨 “做某事的是某人”与“某人做某事”两类句式理解过程中主体职业特征与动作表征的激活。结果发现，在“做某事的是某人”句子理解过程中，主体的职业特征和动作表征得到了激活，但在“某人做某事”句子理解过程中，主体职业特征表征和动作表征只有其中一种表征处于匹配状态时，另一种表征才能得到明显的激活。这表明，句子理解过程中，主体职业特征表征得到了激活，而主体职业特征表征与动作执行器表征的同时激活则受到对方匹配情况的影响，知觉符号理论得到了进一步的证明。

关键词: 具身认知, 知觉符号理论, 职业特征, 动作