The issue of embodiement in language processing and the case of verbs

The embodied cognition framework defines a set of theories arguing for the importance of perception, action, and introspection for different cognitive skills, including semantic memory and language. A relevant aspect in the construction of verb meaning is the dimension of relative embodiment, which represents how much a verb involves the body. The present study aims to: 1) replicate the relative embodiment rating collected for English verbs by Sidhu et al. (2014) on a set of Italian verbs; 2) test the cross-linguistic stability of relative embodiment ratings; 3) investigate the relationship between this dimension and other semantic properties associated with verbs across the two languages. We administered an online-based rating task to 67 Italianspeaking participants, who provided relative embodiment values for 647 Italian verbs carefully translated from the English set. We measured the association between Italian and English relative embodiment ratings to test the cross-linguistic stability. Then, we compared the rating values across different semantic classes to test differences due to the meaning characteristics. Our results showed a strong correlation between the English and Italian rating for the dimension of relative embodiment, highlighting its importance for the meaning of verbs. We also found that the verbs included in body-related semantic classes obtained higher relative embodiment ratings, compared to more abstract verbs. Finally, we observed significant crosslinguistic differences in relative embodiment ratings involving specific semantic classes, as in the case of communicative verbs. Our findings confirm that relative embodiment is a fundamental dimension for the semantic representation of verbs and that this semantic feature is stable across languages. These results offer new perspectives concerning the potential role of relative embodiment in lexical access processes.