Please join us for the following talk in room G26, 7 George Square. The link to the online Teams meeting will be sent to the mailing list closer to the time for those who cannot join us in Edinburgh.

Speaker

Time and date

November 11th, 2 PM.

Title and abstract

Comprehension of written text entails the integration of linguistic information, visual imagery, and background knowledge, all of which contribute to constructing a coherent mental representation of the narrative. Research on first language (L1) comprehension demonstrates that readers mentally simulate perceptual features such as “shape” during reading (e.g., Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). However, evidence regarding the simulation of “orientation” remains inconclusive. Some studies report an orientation-match advantage (e.g., Zwaan & Pecher, 2012), whereas others find no such effect (e.g., de Koning et al., 2017). Previous research also highlights that the degree of relevance between mental simulation and sentence interpretation influences the strength of simulation effects.

The present study investigates whether mental simulation occurs in both an L1 (Japanese) and a second language (L2: English). I conducted two sentence–picture verification experiments with native Japanese speakers who learned English as a foreign language through the Japanese educational system. In both experiments, all sentence and picture pairs were designed to ensure high relevance between perceptual features (shape and orientation) and sentence meaning.

The results showed that shape simulation occurs reliably in both L1 and L2, though more strongly in L1, while orientation simulation does not emerge. These findings suggest that mental simulation in reading is dimension-specific and language-sensitive. Being conceptually salient and easily visualized, shape information may be more readily simulated than orientation, which requires more spatial transformation.

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