Found in Translation

Abstract

remarkable. As you read these words, you are taking abstract symbols from the page or screen and extracting meaning from them. They are no longer mere squiggles of ink or pixels — or, in the case of spoken words, patterns of sound. You know what they refer to. Quite how the mind pulls off this nifty trick has troubled philosophers and cognitive scientists for as long as they have been thinking about language. A prominent view within cognitive science is that linguistic terms are converted into signs or ‘tokens’ in a ‘language of thought’, sometimes known as Mentalese. These tokens correspond to the relevant entities in the world. When you read the word ‘accordion’, for example, a Mentalese token is activated, which allows you to have thoughts about a noisy musical instrument played by squeezing. In his impressive debut, Louder Than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen tries to persuade us of an alternative view: that we understand language through a process of embodied simulation. Bergen supports this view by reviewing around 200 scientific studies, by his count, from several teams that have been converging on this model during the past couple of decades. According to Bergen’s hypothesis, you understand the meaning of a word through the mental recreation of what it would be like to experience the thing being described. So when you hear the word ‘accordion’, the visual areas of your brain generate an image of an accordion. When you hear the verb ‘squeeze’, your motor system rehearses the firing that would achieve a squeeze, without going so far as to send the corresponding commands to your muscles. Much of Bergen’s evidence for this account relies on different interference effects, such as the trusty “action–sentence compatibility effect”. For example, subjects are asked to read a sentence describing an action (such holding a marble with a closed fist) while simultaneously pressing a button in a way (such as with a flat palm) that is physically distinct from the described action. The mismatch between the described and performed actions slows language processing, suggesting that the comprehension of action-related language shares cognitive and neural resources with the real-life performance of those actions. An obvious question is how Bergen’s system deals with abstracts. Bergen reasons that much of our language about abstract concepts actually relies on concrete metaphors, meaning that both types of language can be underpinned by the same kinds of simulation. For NEUROSC IENCE