ONE BODY, MULTIPLE REPRESENTATIONS: THE CONTRIBUTION OF LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE ON SPATIAL BODY REPRESENTATION

Abstract Despite the way we represent our body is a really complex and multifaced issue, a huge emphasis in the literature has been put on the role of sensorial processes, while little is still known about the potential influence of language experience and, specifically, semantic knowledge. On these grounds, here we investigated whether a body representation can be derived from language and whether this linguistic information comes at play in behavioral tasks tapping on spatial body representation. Natural language is indeed known to capture well the structure of spatial information such as geographic representations. Thus, in a first experiment, we successfully recovered the spatial representation of the human body from language experience, by employing distributional semantic models that induce words meanings from large databases of natural language data. In particular, we found a positive correlation between semantic distances and real distances of the human body. Next, we involved 40 participants in a behavioral task and asked them to indicate which body part (among two words presented on the screen) is the closest to a reference point (i.e., half of the participants were asked to perform the task having the eyes as a reference point, while the other half had feet as a reference point). Results showed that, along with real body distances, there was also a significant and independent contribution of semantic distances. Together, these findings indicate that a body representation can be recovered from language only, with this type of body representation being distinct from the one relying on perceptual processes.