The framework of embodied cognition, which claims that sensorimotor information is crucially involved in language comprehension, has made considerable contributions to the development of concept processing and word recognition research in recent decades. Current debates, however, have been criticized for the difficulty of fully explaining the characteristics of concept or sematic representations with this framework alone. In this brief article, I reviewed empirical studies of mental simulation in concept processing and word recognition based on the framework of embodied cognition, and presented criticisms for those studies. I then outlined some of the major models and theories of conceptual and semantic representations, including accounts of abstract concept representations, which have been widely discussed in recent years. These studies suggest that we should not examine whether concepts are embodied, but rather examine how they are grounded in diverse systems such as sensorimotor system, mental states, language system, environment, and context.
