Study on the effect of embodiment on Lexicosemantic Aging: Evidence based on the processing of Chinese action verbs

Abstract

Previous studies have extensively found that language is embodied and language undergoes aging, yet little attention has been paid to correlate the two issues. To address this gap, the present study put forward the Embodiment Effect on Lexicosemantic Aging (EELA) Hypothesis, which posits that words with stronger magnitude of embodiment are less susceptible to aging, whereas words with weaker magnitude of embodiment exhibit greater aging effects. To test this hypothesis, the present study employed three categories of action verbs, namely, the limb action verb, the face action verb, and the natural-change action verb, which were graded in embodiment, and recruited three age groups of adults (i.e., young, middle-aged and elderly ones) to perform a semantic categorization task. The results revealed a systematic processing hierarchy, with action verbs with the largest embodiment magnitude (limb action verbs) underwent the least aging, action verbs with the second largest embodiment magnitude (face action verbs) underwent more aging, action verbs with the smallest embodiment magnitude (natural-change action verbs) underwent the largest aging. These findings provide support for the EELA Hypothesis.

Keywords

Chinese action verbs / Embodiment / Lexicosemantic Aging / The EELA Hypothesis

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jiang Meng: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Luo Qi: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Wang Xia: Conceptualization, Visualization, Writing - review & editing. Tian Zhenling: Visualization, Writing - review & editing.

Informed consent

Informed consent letters were obtained from all the individual participants included in this study.

Human ethics and consent to participate declarations

Not applicable

Code availability

Not applicable

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Sichuan International Studies University approved our retrospective study. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the IRB of Sichuan International Studies University.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 20BYY095), the Chongqing Social Science Planning Fund (Grant No. 2019YBYY131), and the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project Fund of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 22SKGH236).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research has received fundings from the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 20BYY095), the Chongqing Social Science Planning Fund (Grant No. 2019YBYY131), and the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project Fund of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 22SKGH236). The authors would like to thank Daiyue Qu and Yuli Hao for their meticulous review of this article.

Appendix

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