Abstract
Studies based on the embodied cognition framework indicate that comprehension of sentence describing an action activates sensorimotor information through mental simulation. Recent studies of word recognition, however, showed that the activation of sensorimotor information is task dependent. Therefore we investigated whether the perceptual information is activated by which participants read aloud the sentence. In this experiment, we used sentences that have shown that perceptual information is activated by the judgment of acceptability of the sentence. Participants read aloud the sentence describing a tool-using action and then judged whether a tool in the picture is matched with the tool referred in the sentence. Results showed that judgment times did not differ between the actions in the pictures were congruent with the actions described in the sentences and when they were incongruent. This result suggests that mental simulation does not emerge routinely in language processing, but emerges in a task dependent manner.
