Schematicity and compasitionality in experiential theories of language comprehension

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Experiential theories of language comprehension claim that comprehension is based on modal representations, which are grounded in perception and action. A large body of research has demonstrated that there is a close relationship between language comprehension and modal representations. However, the exact nature of these representations is not clear. Also, there is little evidence for the claim that modal representations are indeed essential to achieve an adequate understanding of linguistic expressions. The proposed research, which extends research funded by an ongoing fellowship, investigates these questions with six experiments. Based on a newly developed category-learning paradigm, three experiments compare the validity of schema-theoretic and exemplar views as representational models for experiential theories of language comprehension. Three further experiments use a dual-task paradigm to test whether the activation of color representations is an essential component of the comprehension of sentences involving colordiagnostic objects.