Purpose: The Parent-Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English (Parent EMBRACE) program offers a bilingual parent-training literacy intervention for Latino families. Within the context of shared book reading, the application leverages both the home language and technology to increase parent question-asking during shared reading. Research goals were to (a) examine the potential of the Parent EMBRACE tutoring system at teaching parents to increase the quantity and variety of their question-asking during shared book reading, (b) examine changes to parents' reading attitudes or motivation, and (c) examine whether children's reading attitude is correlated with parent interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF"Are you LISTENING?" may be one of the most frequent questions preschoolers hear from their parents and teachers, but can children be taught to listen carefully-and thus better comprehend language-and if so, what changes occur in their brains? Twenty-seven four- and five-year-old children were taught a language simulation strategy to use while listening to stories: first, they practiced moving graphics on an iPad to correspond to the story actions, and then they practiced imagining the movements. Compared to a control condition, children in the intervention answered comprehension questions more accurately when imagining moving the graphics and on a measure of transfer using a new story without any instruction and with only immovable graphics. Importantly, for children in the intervention, the change in comprehension from the first to the sixth day was strongly correlated with changes in EEG mu and alpha desynchronization, suggesting changes in motor and visual processing following the intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLanguage processing is influenced by sensorimotor experiences. Here, we review behavioral evidence for embodied and grounded influences in language processing across six linguistic levels of granularity. We examine (a) sub-word features, discussing grounded influences on iconicity (systematic associations between word form and meaning); (b) words, discussing boundary conditions and generalizations for the simulation of color, sensory modality, and spatial position; (c) sentences, discussing boundary conditions and applications of action direction simulation; (d) texts, discussing how the teaching of simulation can improve comprehension in beginning readers; (e) conversations, discussing how multi-modal cues improve turn taking and alignment; and (f) text corpora, discussing how distributional semantic models can reveal how grounded and embodied knowledge is encoded in texts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the significance and directions of the relationships among oral and manual fine motor skills and language abilities among Spanish-English bilingual children. If such relationships exist, this would support a shared biological influence on motor and language development.
Method: Participants included 56 bilingual children, 24 of whom met criteria for developmental language disorder (DLD), recruited based on teacher concern for language and/or reading comprehension abilities.
Purpose: We evaluated the efficacy of a reading comprehension intervention with dual language learners (DLLs) with documented English reading comprehension difficulties, half of whom had a developmental language disorder. The intervention EMBRACE (Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English) required children to move images on an iPad to both improve and demonstrate understanding of multichapter stories. Additionally, we determined the characteristics of students who most benefit from the intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this article, we contextualize and discuss an on-line contribution to this special issue in which a video-recorded lecture demonstrates the teaching of an abstract mathematical concept, namely regression to the mean. We first motivate the pertinence of this example from the perspective of embodied cognition. Then, we identify mechanisms of teaching that reflect embodied cognitive practices, such as the concreteness fading approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
July 2021
The gleam-glum effect is a novel sound symbolic finding that words with the /i:/-phoneme (like gleam) are perceived more positive emotionally than matched words with the /Λ/-phoneme (like glum). We provide data that not only confirm the effect but also are consistent with an explanation that /i:/ and /Λ/ articulation tend to co-occur with activation of positive versus negative emotional facial musculature respectively. Three studies eliminate selection bias by including all applicable English words from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis video is a proof of concept that ideas from embodied cognition can be used to understand how the brain and cognitive systems deal with very abstract concepts. The video teaches regression to the mean using three ideas. The first idea is directly related to embodied cognition: abstract concepts are grounded in perceptual, motor, and emotional systems by using successive levels of grounding within an extended procedure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe propose that grounded procedures may help explain psychological variations across cultures. Here we offer a set of novel predictions based on the interplay between the social and physical ecology, chronic sensorimotor experience, and cultural norms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLang Speech Hear Serv Sch
July 2018
Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an English-only version and a Spanish-support version of an embodied reading comprehension intervention (Moved by Reading) consisting of 3 stages (physical manipulation, imagined manipulation, and transfer) for Spanish-English dual language learners.
Method: Sixty-one dual language learners in Arizona were randomly assigned to 4 groups (Spanish-support control, Spanish-support intervention, English-only control, and English-only intervention). Analyses of variance were used to compare control and intervention groups and to compare groups according to the language of the intervention.
Research from multiple areas in neuroscience suggests a link between self-locomotion and memory. In two free recall experiments with adults, we looked for a link between (a) memory, and (b) the coherence of movement and optic flow. In both experiments, participants heard lists of words while on a treadmill and wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAt least since the late nineteenth century, researchers have sought an explanation for infantile amnesia (IA)-the lack of autobiographical memories dating from early childhood-and childhood amnesia (CA), faster forgetting of events up until the age of about seven. Evidence suggests that IA occurs across altricial species, and a number of studies using animal models have converged on the hypothesis that maturation of the hippocampus is an important factor. But why does the hippocampus mature at one time and not another, and how does that maturation relate to memory? Our hypothesis is rooted in theories of embodied cognition, and it provides an explanation both for hippocampal development and the end of IA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrimates are expert tool users because they can adapt their body schemas to form a hand-tool joint representation that affords effective wielding. Here we extend the scope of this mechanism by proposing that humans are experts in social tasks because they can adjust their body schemas to incorporate the kinematics of partners, thus forming an interpersonal joint body schema. Participants engaged with a confederate in a 2-handed sawing task requiring each to use 1 hand.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFB. Z. Mahon (see record 2015-22897-004) has provided a real service to those researchers investigating human cognition by clearly framing much of the debate between an embodied approach to cognition and an abstract alternative.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience has changed many of our dearly held and commonsensical (but incorrect) beliefs. For example, few still believe the world is flat, and few still believe the sun orbits the earth. Few still believe humans are unrelated to the rest of the animal kingdom, and soon few will believe human thinking is computer-like.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIs the mirror neuron system (MNS) used in language understanding? According to embodied accounts of language comprehension, understanding sentences describing actions makes use of neural mechanisms of action control, including the MNS. Consequently, repeatedly comprehending sentences describing similar actions should induce adaptation of the MNS thereby warping its use in other cognitive processes such as action recognition and prediction. To test this prediction, participants read blocks of multiple sentences where each sentence in the block described transfer of objects in a direction away or toward the reader.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSensorimotor mechanisms can unify explanations at cognitive, social, and cultural levels. As an example, we review how anticipated motor effort is used by individuals and groups to judge distance: the greater the anticipated effort the greater the perceived distance. Anticipated motor effort can also be used to understand cultural differences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIf language comprehension requires a sensorimotor simulation, how can abstract language be comprehended? We show that preparation to respond in an upward or downward direction affects comprehension of the abstract quantifiers "more and more" and "less and less" as indexed by an N400-like component. Conversely, the semantic content of the sentence affects the motor potential measured immediately before the upward or downward action is initiated. We propose that this bidirectional link between motor system and language arises because the motor system implements forward models that predict the sensory consequences of actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerspect Psychol Sci
September 2013
In 1988, the cognitive revolution had become institutionalized: Cognition was the manipulation of abstract symbols by rules. But, much like institutionalized political parties, some of the ideas were becoming stale. Where was action? Where was the self? How could cognition be smoothly integrated with emotions, with social psychology, with development, with clinical analyses? Around that time, thinkers in linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, biology, and psychology were formulating the idea that just as overt behavior depends on the specifics of the body in action, so might cognition depend on the body.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLanguage and action systems are functionally coupled in the brain as demonstrated by converging evidence using Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and lesion studies. In particular, this coupling has been demonstrated using the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) in which motor activity and language interact. The ACE task requires participants to listen to sentences that described actions typically performed with an open hand (e.
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