From demonstration to theory in embodied language comprehension: A review Oleksandr V. Horchak a,⇑ , Jean-Christophe Giger a , Maria Cabral a , Grzegorz Pochwatko b a Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Algarve, Portugal b Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland Received 2 May 2013; accepted 15 September 2013 Available online 29 September 2013 Abstract Recent findings in psychology, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience present a challenge to current amodal theories by suggesting that cognitive states are not disembodied in language comprehension. Accumulating behavioral evidence supporting this view is reviewed from research on processing of language describing concrete and abstract concepts. The extant embodied theories that support either a strong or a moderate embodied view are then presented, as are the perspectives that define how the researchers discuss the role of sen- sory-motor grounding in language processing. The article concludes by discussing several lines of research that might help distinguish between various theoretical approaches and resolve some of the fundamental issues that fuel much of the debate in the field. Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Embodied cognition; Language comprehension; Concrete concepts; Abstract concepts; Embodied theories 1. Introduction An amodal system theory that emerged from the Cog- nitive Revolution in the 1950s remained dominant for over five decades in the area of language comprehension. According to this theory, processing of language is based on abstract, amodal symbols that are arbitrarily related to their referents. From this perspective, the mind is an abstract information processor and sensory-motor sys- tems are not relevant to understanding high-level cogni- tive processes (Fodor, 1975; Newell & Simon, 1976; Pylyshyn, 1984). The idea that relations among symbols may lead to successful language processing was corrobo- rated by several symbolic models describing how human memory is organized semantically and schematically (e.g., Bobrow & Norman, 1975; Charniak, 1978; Norman, 1975; Quillian, 1969; Rumelhart, 1975; Shank & Abelson, 1995; Smith, Shoben, & Rips, 1974) as well as computational implementations, such as Knowledge Representation Language (Bobrow & Winograd, 1977), CYC (Lenat & Guha, 1989), Hyperspace Analog to Lan- guage (Lund & Burgess, 1996), Topic Model (Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004), and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) of Landauer and Dumais (1997). Furthermore, the demon- strations of the most popular model, such as LSA, in picking out synonyms, measuring coherence of texts (Landauer & Dumais, 1997), and even scoring students’ essays (Landauer, Laham, Rehder, & Schreiner, 1997) led some scholars to support the potential of this model to account for human meaning (e.g., Landauer, 2002; Louwerse & Ventura, 2005). Nonetheless, about 10 years ago the dominance of amo- dal theory was challenged and ultimately declined by the appearance of a new embodied account of cognition. This new account is based on the idea that language processing should be viewed in the context of relationship between the mind and the body. Neuroscientific research provided sub- 1389-0417/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2013.09.002 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Faculdade Cie ˆncias Humanas e Sociais, Departamento de Psicologia e Cie ˆncias da Educac ßa ˜o, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal. E-mail addresses: ohorchak@ualg.pt (O.V. Horchak), jhgiger@ualg.pt (J.-C. Giger), mcabral@ualg.pt (M. Cabral), grzegorz.pochwatko@p- sych.pan.pl (G. Pochwatko). www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsys Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Cognitive Systems Research 29–30 (2014) 66–85