Fault-tolerant comprehension
When you read about a person double-lutzing off a cliff, your ability to understand what is described depends on your experience and world knowledge. Most people will at least surmise that the person is a death-defying thrill-seeker and imagine a precipice. Winter sports aficionados might peg the double-lutzer as a suicidal ice-skater, picture an icy cliff, and note that sticking the landing will be exceptionally tricky. In addition to this, a professional figure-skater might mentally simulate the process of building up speed, jumping, and completing two revolutions while airborne or recall the last time he completed a double-lutz. This example illustrates two aspects of language comprehension that we will highlight in this chapter. First, the depth of a person’s understanding of a described event depends upon her experience and world knowledge. Second, as a reader’s relevant knowledge decreases, his understanding of an event does not suddenly disappear, but degrades gracefully. That is, comprehension is a fault-tolerant process in which different people with various degrees of experience understand event descriptions at different levels of depth and granularity.
Language comprehension has long been viewed as the conversion of linguistic symbols to a “language of thought” (Fodor, 1975; Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978). Recent evidence, however, suggests that language comprehension involves the activation of the brain’s sensorimotor system (Barsalou, 2008; Martin, 2007). Some have taken this evidence to support the idea that language comprehension consists entirely of the sensorimotor simulation of situations described with language. Others argue that the observed sensorimotor simulation is epiphenomenal and that the backbone of comprehension consists of the manipulation of abstract, arbitrary, and amodal symbols (Pylyshyn, 1980). Most current discussion revolves around the question to which degree sensorimotor activation is relevant to language comprehension (Andrews et al., 2009; Barsalou, in press; Chatterjee, 2010; Louwerse and Jeuniaux, 2008).
Here, we argue that the results lend support to the idea of fault-tolerant language processing. Fault-tolerant language processing claims: (1) semantic representations are multi-variegated (i.e. supported by widely distributed, multimodal representations; Taylor and Zwaan, 2009); (2) as a result, semantic representations exhibit graceful degradation when an individual has limited personal experience or suffers localized brain damage; and (3) language comprehension is fault-tolerant—a degraded or incomplete representation (caused by a lack of experience or brain lesions) results in slower or qualitatively different levels of understanding. Importantly, some form of understanding, or functional semantic processing, is still possible under such circumstances. To make our case, we begin by assessing one of the stronger hypotheses made by embodied cognition: sensorimotor activation is necessary for successful language comprehension.
An answer to this necessity question (Fischer and Zwaan, 2008) is not readily apparent. However, the current literature allows us to venture an educated guess. Lesioned motor neurons are associated with significantly disrupted, but intact, processing of action-related language. Patients with motor neuron disease have a consistent and selective impairment for the comprehension and production of verbs, relative to nouns (Bak et al., 2001, 2006). Patients with Parkinson’s disease, which primarily impairs the performance of overt actions, perform abnormally on a lexical decision task for action verbs, but not for concrete nouns; treatment of the physical motor deficit brings performance on action verbs up to the level of concrete nouns (Boulenger et al., 2008). Converging evidence from healthy controls points to the importance of the motor cortex. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) allows researchers to selectively and temporarily disrupt or facilitate activity in targeted regions of the cortex in healthy participants and observe the consequences for language tasks. Applying TMS to the hand and leg areas of the left hemisphere speeds lexical decisions on hand and leg verbs, respectively (Pulvermüller et al., 2005). Meanwhile, disrupting the left motor cortex with repetitive stimulation causes participants to make morphological changes to action words (verbs and nouns) more slowly (Gerfo et al., 2008). Neurological studies consistently show an association between disrupted processing of action-related language and dysfunctions of motor neurons (Arévalo et al., 2007; Arévalo et al., in press; Kemmerer et al., in press). In diseased populations, lexical or semantic processing tends to remain intact, but with significantly slower or less fluent performance.
This evidence suggests two conclusions. First, motor activation is not necessary for minimal comprehension. To some extent this leads us to reconsider what we mean by comprehension. If the goal is a sparse representation with minimal mappings to the comprehender’s experiential repertoire, then motor activation does not appear necessary. But what if we demand more from comprehension? Further research shows an association between motor activation and deeper understanding of actions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) occasionally lacks the sensitivity to detect activation in the motor cortex for shallow lexical processing of action words (e.g., Postle et al., 2008), but actively imagining actions leads to the activity in motor regions predicted by stronger versions of embodied cognition (Filimon et al., 2007; Tomasino et al., 2007).
Second, lacking motor representations leads to impoverished or suboptimal understanding of action-related language. Converging imaging data support the complement of this claim: motor expertise within a domain results in an enhanced ability to understand actions that fall within one’s domain of expertise. The premotor cortex of experienced dancers is more active when they are viewing routines that they know how to perform (Calvo-Merino et al., 2005), relative to less familiar routines or styles. The effect of expertise extends to language comprehension; experienced hockey players understand sentences about hockey better than novices and show increased activity in the left premotor cortex while reading such sentences (Beilock et al., 2008). Deeper semantic processing on the individual level is associated with effects on the action system. Either premeditated action-planning or semantic processing that is deeper than simple word detection is sufficient to cause priming between linguistic input and goal-directed action; word-exposure (or lexical decision) alone has not been found to prime a goal-directed action (Lindemann et al., 2006). Dominant-handed responses to hand action verbs, relative to foot action verbs, are disrupted during a semantic decision task, but not during a lexical decision task and not (1,000 ms) after a semantic decision has already been made (Sato et al., 2008).
Taken together, the research reviewed above suggests that referential sensorimotor activation (Fischer and Zwaan, 2008) during reading contributes to deeper levels of language comprehension. In line with this view, we would expect motor activation to become more situation-specific as linguistic context becomes more constraining. Words presented in isolation do not offer much information to language users (see also Rueschemeyer and Bekkering, this volume). Likewise, when they are presented to participants and naturally processed, they typically result in the activation of relatively broad, underspecified (Sanford and Graesser, 2009) representations. Such underspecification is functional in naturalistic language processing because it allows words to be more readily integrated with upcoming (or pre-existing) information from the physical, social, or linguistic environment (see also “Good-enough representations,” Ferreira et al., 2002). Relevant behavioral and neuroimaging research demonstrates that words presented in isolation activate more broadly constrained experiential information consisting of individual modalities or effectors in language users. However, as more constraining information from text is processed, the associated activation in the reader becomes increasingly situation-specific; that is, readers construct a situation model that is increasingly precise in resolution or elaborate with details (Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998). The granularity of sensorimotor activation in language users is a function of text-based constraints.
A very coarse level of granularity for experiential information is the experiential modality (e.g., visual or motor). Individual words presented in a relatively open-ended context reveal this broadest, or most underspecified, activation in language users. When participants perform a lexical decision task before reaching to grasp an object, their wrists reach their peak acceleration faster when they judge action verbs as opposed to concrete nouns denoting non-manipulable objects (Boulenger et al., 2006). Crucially, this occurs rapidly (within 200 ms) and regardless of whether the verb denotes actions carried out with the arm, leg, or mouth. A deeper semantic decision task on similar verbs results in a more complete activation of verb-related motor programs (Dalla Volta et al., in press), supporting a link between processing depth and the recruitment of the motor system (Taylor and Zwaan, 2009).
Further experiments have shown that the modality level of specificity is also activated by a deeper, more semantic task such as property verification. For instance, participants are slower to judge whether an object has a property when it is in the same modality as information that they are currently holding in short-term memory. That is, participants are slower to confirm that a lemon can be yellow when they have just been asked to remember three meaningless visual stimuli that they must recognize after the property judgment (Vermeulen et al., 2008). Similarly, when participants are merely asked to confirm that they have detected a physical stimulus, subsequent concept-property judgments on words are slower when the judged property is in a different modality than the physical stimulus (van Dantzig et al., 2008).
A finer level of granularity beyond experiential modality is well established for motor representations; individual effectors of the motor system can be activated by language describing effector-specific actions. Passively reading verbs referring to actions that are carried out with the arm, leg, or face (pick, kick, or lick) leads to activation in the areas of the motor strip that are associated with actual movement of the relevant effector (Hauk et al., 2004; however, see Chatterjee, 2010). Convergent behavioral research confirms that effector-specific activation remains relevant up to the sentence and discourse level. When participants judge the sensibility of actions denoted by noun-verb pairs (e.g., “suck the sweet” and “unwrap the sweet” or “throw the ball” and “kick the ball”) by speaking into a microphone or pressing a foot pedal, they make the judgment faster when they respond with the same effector that the phrase they have just read describes (Scorolli and Borghi, 2007; see also Buccino et al., 2005).
Even finer than effector-specific activation, action parameters (Schmidt, 1975), such as the speed or direction of throwing a ball, have been shown to be tightly coupled to the content of a sentence. Crucially, parameter-specific activation appears to be effector-specific, indicating that the lower level activations merge to form a more holistic simulation (Taylor and Zwaan, submitted) of the described event. When participants judge sentences by making sensibility judgments toward the body, they are faster to do so when responding to sentences about transfers toward the body (Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002). A follow-up experiment showed differential activity of the hand muscles immediately after participants read the verbs of such transfer sentences (Glenberg et al., 2008).
Biomechanical intensity is also affected when people read or hear about actions. In one study, participants listened to a sentence about manually interacting with a light or heavy object before lifting one of two visually identical boxes that differed in actual weight. Participants were slower to lift the heavier box after hearing sentences about heavier objects (Scorolli et al., 2009; see also Borghi, this volume). In a different study, participants made sensibility judgments on sentences describing high or low degrees of force (e.g., “He pushed the car” and “He started the car”) by using their dominant hand to squeeze a device that measured the force of the response. Participants systematically applied more force in response to sentences implying more force (Taylor and Zwaan, submitted). In a further study using the same methodology, participants responded to sentences describing high or low force actions with the arms (e.g., “He nudged the man forcefully/gently”), legs (“He climbed the stairs quickly/slowly”), or no effector at all (“He opposed the agenda directly/calmly”). Participants systematically applied more force in response to high-force sentences, but only in response to sentences about arm actions. This provides evidence consistent with the claim that activation of the lower levels of the motor system, such as individual action parameters or specific effectors, combine to form narrower and more situation-specific simulations for larger, more constraining strings of text (i.e. sentences describing particular actions).
Additional research provides further support for this rapid pruning process (or constraint-satisfaction; Kintsch, 1988) during sentence comprehension. According to this account, the activation of language-induced experiential information is initially quite broad and diffuse but becomes increasingly narrow upon the presentation of linguistic context that reduces the potential interpretations of a word or sentence. For example, the verb kick presented in isolation results in more activation in the motor cortex than do literal phrases such as kick the ball; idiomatic phrases such as kick the bucket result in still less motor activation (Raposo et al., 2009). This result is compatible with the activation of more experiences of kicking in response to the lone verb, fewer experiences of kicking in response to the more constraining phrase kick the ball, and no experiences of literally kicking in response to kick the bucket (however, see Boulenger et al., 2009). While this research shows information subsequent to a verb narrows its interpretation, information presented immediately before an action verb narrows its interpretation as well. Abstract verbs with a motor stem (e.g., begreifen, which means “to understand”) do not result in motor activation, while the stems themselves (greifen, which means “to grasp”) do (Rueschemeyer et al., 2007).
FUNCTIONAL RELEVANCE
An important criticism of research from the embodied cognition perspective is that sensorimotor activation is epiphenomenal to the processes underlying the understanding of the meaning behind text. Illustrating that such activation is functionally relevant for language users helps to counter such a criticism. Indeed, the activation of sensorimotor information during text processing aids in understanding language, mapping language on to one’s environment, and acquiring information from text.
As incoming words of a text are processed and integrated into a situation model, attention is systematically guided toward different aspects of the referential situation. The more a comprehender is able to activate relevant information, the better he or she will be able to anticipate upcoming information and the more fluent the comprehension process will be (Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan and Kaschak, 2009). This points to what may be the crucial role of the sensorimotor system in comprehension: it enhances the fluency and completeness of our understanding of the meaning of a sentence.
In a set of studies, participants read about direction-specific manual rotation while manually rotating a knob in order to proceed through sentences in groups of one to three words. When participants’ actual manual rotation matched the direction described by the sentence, they were faster to read the verb that disambiguated the direction of rotation than when there was a mismatch between implied and actual rotation direction (Zwaan and Taylor, 2006). In a subsequent study the same paradigm was used, but the critical items were rewritten such that the critical verb was followed by an adverb. The adverbs were intended to maintain focus on the action (e.g., quickly, slowly) in Experiment 1 and to direct focus towards the sentence subject (e.g., happily, obediently) in Experiment 2. According to the Linguistic Focus Hypothesis (LFH), sustained focus on the action should be accompanied by sustained motor resonance while switching focus to the subject should not; the results supported this prediction (Taylor and Zwaan, 2008).
In a further study using the reading-by-rotation paradigm, participants read two sentences; the first sentence described an instance of manual rotation and the second sentence disambiguated the direction of rotation on a critical adjective (e.g., He examined the/pie through/the microwave/window and/turned the/timer./The cooking/time needed/to be/shorter [longer].). Again, participants were faster to read the critical disambiguating word when there was a match between the rotation direction implied by the sentence and the participants’ actual manual rotation (Taylor et al., 2008).
In addition to guiding a reader’s attention toward different aspects of the referential situation, bodily information may also help readers determine when events described in text are likely to co-occur. Likewise, participants are slower to read a sentence if it describes two actions involving the same effector being performed simultaneously (e.g., unlocking a studio door while painting a woman’s face), which is either impossible or highly improbable. Crucially, participants are not slowed if the actions are described as being performed successively (e.g., painting a woman’s face after unlocking a studio door) or if one of the actions is merely considered (e.g., thinking of driving a nail into the wall while writing a letter; de Vega et al., 2004; see also Zwaan et al., 2010). Earlier research previously demonstrated that reading about actions that cannot be performed simultaneously leads to impoverished long-term memory representations compared to reading about actions that can be performed simultaneously (Radvansky et al., 1998). These findings imply that one potential function of bodily activation in readers is to keep readers abreast of which actions are the most likely to occur, or which actions are even possible, given the constraints of the human body.
The rapid activation of situation-specific experiential knowledge during text comprehension is also functional when meaning must be mapped on to one’s immediate environment. In one experimental paradigm (Altmann and Kamide, 1999), participants listen to a sentence (“the boy will move/eat the cake”) and must judge whether it could reasonably apply to a simultaneously presented depiction of what the text describes (a boy, a cake, and additional non-edible items). Relative to the verb “move,” the verb “eat” facilitates eye-movements toward the cake before the onset of “cake.” Participants rapidly used the information inherent in the verb “eat” to constrain the possibilities for upcoming information in the text. This leads them to avert their gazes toward the only edible item in the scene (the cake) before the text explicitly mentions it by name. In a follow-up study differences in verb tense (e.g., “… has drunk …” vs. “… will drink …”) differentially affected eye-movements toward an empty wine glass and a full beer glass (Altmann and Kamide, 2007). Similarly, when instructed to move a whistle, a participant holding a hook in his hand is more likely to look at a whistle that can be picked up with a hook than a whistle that cannot (Chambers et al., 2004). In one study, participants made judgments on the size of spheres and cubes presented on a computer screen by squeezing a response device that gave an indication of grasping circumference (Taylor and Zwaan, 2010). The smallest spheres were found to yield the smallest grip responses when the experimental instructions referred to them as “spheres” (Experiment 1), but not when they were referred to as “planets” (Experiment 3), providing further evidence that linguistic input modulates the way a person attends to and acts toward his environment.
Further evidence supports the notion that the activation of referential sensorimotor knowledge during reading affects the acquisition of information that can be learned from text or instruction. When children learn to map situation-specific knowledge gleaned from text on to an actual situation, their comprehension of passages of text is enhanced relative to children who read the same text twice (Glenberg et al., 2004). In a similar vein, Paulus et al. (in press) trained participants to recognize different functional uses for objects (that could be placed next to the ear to be heard or under the nose to be smelled). They found that participants’ ability to recognize the functional actions was affected when they were made to perform a secondary task with the hands during the training phase (see also Rueschemeyer and Bekkering, this volume).
So far, we have enumerated evidence that motor representations are not necessary for action understanding. Instead, motor representations are elaborative; they contribute unique information to action understanding that leads to richer representations for language comprehension and action perception. Further, motor representations contribute to situated language use, learning concepts, and enhancing comprehension in educational settings.
FAULT-TOLERANT PROCESSING
Our considerations have led us to adopt the view that comprehension is a fault-tolerant process, in which understanding can be achieved at multiple levels (Taylor and Zwaan, 2009). The goal of this final section is to further lay out our view. We will do this by first considering different levels at which comprehension can be achieved. Consistent with earlier approaches (e.g., Graesser et al., 1997; Kintsch and van Dijk, 1977; van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998), we define comprehension as the construction of a coherent mental representation of a stretch of language. Coherent means that all the elements of the representation are integrated and can be mapped on to world knowledge.
A minimally coherent representation (McKoon and Ratcliff, 1992) consists only of easily available information and those inferences that are required to make a text locally coherent. For minimally coherent comprehension, achieving global coherence within a larger body of text, making extraneous inferences, and constructing experience-based situation models might be superfluous. It is conceivable that such a skeletal representation is stored in memory and is later fleshed out when relevant experiential information can be brought to bear. For example, when a person’s odd behavior is described in a way that only begins to make sense when that person is actually encountered.
A semi-embodied representation may be one that is only loosely based on one’s own experience, such as a non-hockey fan reading about hockey (Beilock et al., 2008). While the main points of a text may be understood, many of the details are beyond the ability of the individual to grasp. For example, in reading about a gymnast doing ring exercises, comprehenders may only activate programs for contracting the biceps, rather than activating the motor programs appropriate for executing the complex routine.
In theory, fully embodied representations are based on one’s experiences and consist of a mental re-enactment of the events described in text using one’s own sensorimotor systems for experiencing and acting on the world. The degree to which individuals activate such experiential information during language processing necessarily depends on their personal experience with what the text describes and the depth with which they process the text.
While minimalist comprehension may be possible with little to no activation of experiential knowledge, embodied representations enhance the degree to which a text can be mapped on to world knowledge and the richness of that mapping. As reviewed above, they are functionally relevant to learning a new skill from a text, following verbal instructions, applying one’s linguistic environment to one’s immediate surroundings, or otherwise directly mapping word knowledge on to world knowledge.
According to embodied accounts of cognition, understanding verbal descriptions draws upon our experiences with the world. If this is the case, then how do we understand an utterance if and when we have very limited, or no, direct experience with what is being described (as is often the case)? One advantage of multimodal representations that are based on several experiential modalities (visual, motor, auditory, and so on) is that they are fault-tolerant. That is, if one experiential modality is dysfunctional or is completely lacking experience with a concept, the other modalities can compensate for the missing information and prevent the comprehension process from failing entirely. This helps to account for the peculiar performance seen in individuals with damaged motor neurons on tasks involving action-related language; they are usually slower, but better-than-chance on tasks that require semantic processing of action-related language (Bak et al., 2001, 2006; Boulenger et al., 2008). According to our account, their experiences encountering those actions through other experiential modalities are able to help them understand language about actions even if their motor system is not capable of contributing to the process as it normally would.
The functional disruption in such patients, however, betrays an underlying role for motoric representations in language processing that is substantive and unique. Behavioral research on healthy participants indicates that the motor system is uniquely situated to provide several streams of information that the other modalities are not well suited to provide. First, it keeps readers abreast of which actions are likely or possible given the constraints of the human body. Second, details of action parameters such as the force (Scorolli et al., 2009) or direction (Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002) of a movement are readily provided by the motoric representations. Third, details of action from procedural memory for interacting with objects and the world (e.g., the shape of the hand when operating a calculator or grasping a ball) are based in the motor system (Masson et al., 2008; Taylor and Zwaan, 2010).
What happens in the event that the motor system fails to provide such information to support the comprehension process? If a reader is lacking sufficient first-hand experience, she may attempt to recruit information based on her limited experience and knowledge in other experiential modalities. For example, if a reader has never kicked a basketball, she may surmise that it is something like kicking a soccerball. In addition to falling back on first-person experiences, third-person representations relying on other modalities may provide still less-detailed back-up information. In this way, multivariegated (Taylor and Zwaan, 2009), experience-based representations are fault-tolerant; a small lack of relevant experience or a failure by one experiential modality to support a situation model can be supplemented by other experiences or the other modalities.
CONCLUSION
A review of neurological and behavioral research indicates that experiential information, particularly from the motor modality, optimizes language processing by adding depth to our understanding of event descriptions and helping us map the information conveyed through language on to the environment. Assuming that language comprehension relies on a multivariegated representational system, motor activation cannot be said to be necessary for forming a coherent representation of what is described by text. This is because language processing relying on a multivariegated representational system is inherently fault-tolerant. Lacking relevant first-hand experience may result in sub-optimal processing, but other experiences may be recruited to compensate for such shortcomings.
NOTE
We would like to thank Paul Engelhardt, Gabriella Vigliocco, and Maureen Dennis for interesting discussions and helpful comments on previous drafts of this chapter.
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