THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN BODY REPRESENTATIONS AND LANGUAGE: HOW INTEROCEPTION INFLUENCES BODY AND NON-BODY RELATED LANGUAGE PROCESSING.

As the embodied cognition view claims, the body plays a role in supporting the computational circuits that realise cognition, in particular, evidence demonstrates how cognition takes place in the perceptual and motor systems. Starting from these assumptions, they can be considered valid also for the cognitive ability of language, which results grounded on our sensorimotor system and consequently on our body and body representations. Interoception is one of the more recently studied components of body representations and it refers to the internal signals and conditions of our bodies. Through this ability, humans can be connected with their internal states and perceive well-being, pain, stress-level, sickness. Interoception can be described by three dimensions: accuracy, sensibility and awareness. These explain the ability of individuals of interpreting, regulating and being aware of their internal sensations. The aim of the present study was to explore the interplay between language and body representation, in particular between the comprehension of pragmatic language and the ability to perceive signals and information coming from the body. More specifically, we wanted to analyse if interoceptive dimensions influence the body and non-body related language processing. To test these hypotheses, we designed two tasks, one for proving interoceptive ability and one for assessing the processing of figurative language. With the first task, we tested the ability of participants of detecting their heartbeat and we asked them to evaluate their performances. We also ask them to fill a questionnaire in which they could rate their ability in perceiving internal sensation and knowing their bodies. Then, we tested their ability of understanding metaphors trough a sentence meaningfulness judgement task. Participants’ performance was also controlled for mood and general verbal ability. We analysed their efficiency, to check their accuracy and reaction time in the processing of metaphorical sentences. We then verified if this efficiency was related to their interoceptive abilities. The results of our analysis showed an advantage for participants in the processing of sentences containing body parts. Furthermore, this advantage also correlated with their body representation through the dimension of interoceptive sensibility. Our results also indicated a clear effect of condition, demonstrating an evident advantage for participants in the processing of literal sentences if compared to pragmatic sentences. With this study, we tried to extend the assumptions of the embodied cognition view also to the processing of figurative language, but results show no evidence for a strong correlation between the interoceptive competence and the ability of understanding metaphors. But this study confirmed the evidence about the human biased attention towards body-related stimuli. In conclusion, the study can be the basis for further research on the role of the different interoceptive dimensions and how these variables could affect the conceptual representation of the body and the processing of language.