Perceptual simulations beyond the sentence: the effect of narrative shifts on perceptual simulations

Abstract

The present research investigates perceptual simulations within the context of narratives, as only a minority of previous research that investigated mental simulations in language comprehension did so on the discursive level. Participants were given short narrative excerpts, in which random pictorial probes were placed asking participants to decide whether they had encountered the object depicted in the picture within the text. In critical trials, the object depicted was indeed present in the narratives, but the shape in which the object was depicted either matched or mismatched the shape implied by the text. It has previously been documented that people are slower and less accurate in responding to pictorial probes in the case of shape mismatch compared to shape match, implying that they had created a contextspecific perceptual simulation of the critical object as they encountered it in the text. This study extends previous research by investigating whether the match effect described above weakens when a spatial or temporal shift is introduced between the appearance of the object in the text and the pictorial probe. Besides the replication of the shape match effect in a narrative context, the results showed that there was mild evidence towards perceptual simulations getting weaker after a spatial shift. Interestingly, the reverse was the case for the temporal shift. Overall, the results imply that the investigation of mental simulations within the narrative context is a fruitful direction for further research in arriving at a better understanding of embodied language comprehension and language comprehension in general.