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.