The Effect of Grammar in the Mental Simulation of Bilinguals

Sang-Gu Kang (Cheongju University)

The purpose of this study is to find supporting evidence for the role of grammar in mental simulation theory that claims that language comprehenders routinely activate perceptual images. Such simulation-based theory of language comprehension produces a straightforward behavioral prediction. If understanding language is indeed involved with activating the perceptual representations, language including a compatible or incompatible image can function as a prime to facilitate or inhibit the perception of an image that follows. Thus, this research probes whether mental simulations of Korean EFL users differ when comprehending Korean with honorifics and English without honorifics. Native Korean university students participated in an experiment deciding whether the picture of a person following a simple English and Korean sentence is a likely character in the given sentence. Their accuracy and response time are collected and analyzed. The analysis demonstrates that the participants came up with different level of specificity for the images in the mental simulation while comprehending two separate languages due to the presence and absence of a functional grammatical marker. The implication of this paper is that it provided a small piece of experimental evidence to argue for the role of grammar in mental simulation based on the comparison between two languages with different grammatical features.