Volume 2, Issue 1

Speakers move their hands when they talk—they gesture. These gestures can signal whether the speaker is ready to learn a particular task and, in this sense, provide a window onto the speaker's knowledge. But gesture can do more than reflect knowledge. It can play a role in changing knowledge in at least two ways: indirectly through its effects on communication with the learner, and directly through its effects on the learner's cognition. Gesturing is, however, not limited to learners. Speakers who are proficient in a task also gesture. Their gestures have a different relation to speech than the gestures that novices produce, and seem to support cognition rather than change it. Gesturing can thus serve as a tool for thinking and for learning.

This article proposes that the representation of concepts in infancy is in the form of spatial image-schemas. A mechanism that simplifies spatial information is described along with a small set of spatial primitives that are sufficient to account for the conceptualizations that preverbal infants use to interpret objects and events. This early system is important to understand because it organizes the adult conceptual system of objects and events and remains its core. With development, the system becomes enriched by language in several ways, and also by means of analogical extension to nonspatial information. Nonspatial bodily information, such as feelings of force and motor activity, is also added, but remains secondary. It becomes associated with spatial representations, but except for its spatial aspects is represented in a more inchoate and less accessible fashion.

It is widely believed that explicit verbatim memory for language is virtually nonexistent except in certain circumstances, for example if participants are warned they are to receive a memory test, if the language is ‘interactive’ (emotion-laden), or if the texts are exceedingly short and memory is tested immediately. The present experiments revisit the question of verbatim memory for language and demonstrate that participants do reliably recognize and recall full sentences that they are exposed to only once at above chance rates (Experiments 1 and 3). The texts are 300 words long, non-interactive, and no advanced warning of a memory test is given. Verbatim memory is demonstrated even when lexical content and memory for gist are controlled for (Experiments 2 and 4). The most striking finding is one of incidental recall: even after a six-day delay, participants reliably reproduce sentences they have heard before when asked to describe scenes, even though they are not asked to recall what they had heard (Experiment 5).

The idea that concepts are embodied by our motor and sensory systems is popular in current theorizing about cognition. Embodied cognition accounts come in different versions and are often contrasted with a purely symbolic amodal view of cognition. Simulation, or the hypothesis that concepts simulate the sensory and motor experience of real world encounters with instances of those concepts, has been prominent in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Here, with a focus on spatial thought and language, I review some of the evidence cited in support of simulation versions of embodied cognition accounts. While these data are extremely interesting and many of the experiments are elegant, knowing how to best interpret the results is often far from clear. I point out that a quick acceptance of embodied accounts runs the danger of ignoring alternate hypotheses and not scrutinizing neuroscience data critically. I also review recent work from my lab that raises questions about the nature of sensory motor grounding in spatial thought and language. In my view, the question of whether or not cognition is grounded is more fruitfully replaced by questions about gradations in this grounding. A focus on disembodying cognition, or on graded grounding, opens the way to think about how humans abstract. Within neuroscience, I propose that three functional anatomic axes help frame questions about the graded nature of grounded cognition. First, are questions of laterality differences. Do association cortices in both hemispheres instantiate the same kind of sensory or motor information? Second, are questions about ventral dorsal axes. Do neuronal ensembles along this axis shift from conceptual representations of objects to the relationships between objects? Third, are questions about gradients centripetally from sensory and motor cortices towards and within perisylvian cortices. How does sensory and perceptual information become more language-like and then get transformed into language proper?

Personal pronouns belong to the most conservative parts of grammar; that is, they are diachronically fairly stable, as suggested by the fact that in many cases they can be traced back etymologically to or even beyond the earliest stages of reconstructible language history. This is why so far not much progress has been made in unraveling the genesis of personal pronouns: the number of cases where it has been possible to determine their origin is severely limited. Still, some data do exist and allow for the reconstruction of some major lines of grammatical evolution. As we hope to show in this paper, this evolution is the product of a handful of crosslinguistically fairly uniform cognitive and communicative strategies.