Resumen de Embodied semantic structures in movement execution and language

Claudia Böger, Jurgis Skilters

• The roots of semantics are at the level of bodily experience. There are several kinds of empirical evidence supporting this. The present research supports the bodily grounding of meaning and provides some evidence from the analysis of movement execution. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical, cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Embodiment plays a crucial role in meaning determination processes. There is a question which still needs to be studied and which is still lacking a conclusive empirically determined answer: is all semantic material (also the semantic material of higher mental processes usually assumed to be non-perceptual) embodied? We do not have a definitive answer, but we are inclined to think that it is, i.e., the conceptual level of cognitive processing is based on the perceptual level.