Anna Jelec

Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the conceptualisation strategies in gesture of blind and visually impaired children.

The human nervous system evolved for the control of complex physical actions. Yet, we are far from understanding the human capacity for complex abstract thought. One theory suggests that both abstract and concrete thinking is based on a single perceptual mechanism grounded in physical experience. Asking the question posed by psychologist Daniel Casasanto whether "abstract concepts are like dinosaur feathers" we investigate the evolutionary processes that allowed humans to deal with abstract phenomena by putting them in concrete terms. After all, we frequently resort to analogies, similes or metaphors when describing the intangible. We may say "put that into words" as if words were containers into which thought can be stored. Conceptual Metaphor Theory goes a step further by saying that not only do we speak about abstract concepts in physical terms, but we think about them in this manner as well. However, the theory itself has been vigorously criticised because its principal theses are considered impossible to falsify. The author of this book proposes a new perspective on the conceptual role of metaphors. Filled with theoretical analyses and empirical research on the speech and gesture of seeing, blind and visually impaired children, this book demonstrates that the basis for abstract thought may well lie in physical experience.

Embodied simulations or entries in the mental lexicon? Abstract concepts in the language and gesture of blind and visually impaired children.
Despite a plethora of research on the subject, the human capacity for abstract thought remains a mystery. We may know brain activation patterns evoked by the word love, but we are far from understanding how it is conceptualized. Research demonstrates that a vast majority of abstract concepts in language and gesture is represented in concrete terms (Cienki & Müller, 2008; Lakens, 2010; Lakoff, 1987), and many abstract subjects, including communication, are commonly described as sensorimotor experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Szwedek, 2002). We speak about hurtful words and force of argumentation, as if speech had a physical effect; communication is defined as exchange of information, as if meaning was an object handed over to an interlocutor. In general, everyday metaphorical language suggests that abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete experience. However, there are two competing explanations regarding the possible conceptualization mechanism.
Casasanto (2010) suggests that we speak about abstract concepts in concrete terms because humans use brain circuits designed to deal with the physical world to understand both physical and non-physical concepts via a process called exaptation (Gould & Vrba, 1982). Understanding abstract concepts would be, therefore, based on the existing mental representations of concrete concepts and exhibited in metaphorical language. On the other hand, mirror neuron theories claim that language and thought depend on sensorimotor simulations, so that the same circuits are activated when we perform an action and when we think (or speak) about it (Arbib, 2006; Fogassi & Ferrari, 2007; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Evidence for this theory can be sought in correspondences between language and gesture. To compare both theories we looked at the representation of abstract and concrete concepts in the language and gesture of blind and severely visually impaired children. We searched for correspondences between their descriptions of different concepts: both in terms of metaphorical language used and exhibited gesture. Results indicate abstract and concrete concepts are primarily explained using concrete, sensory based language, with participants using descriptors from a variety of sensorimotor domains, including hearing, touch, movement and, to a lesser extent, vision (with the notable absence of smell). The congenitally blind participants in their descriptions of abstract concepts relied on reenacting (simulations of) real life situations rather than metaphorical language. Our preliminary findings imply that understanding of abstract phenomena need not be based on a mental lexicon type network of concrete concepts. The presence of simulations in the descriptions of both types of concepts suggests an involvement of the sensorimotor cortex, in addition to or instead of a semantic network structure.
References
Arbib, M. A. (2006). Action to language via the mirror neuron system. Cambridge University Press.
Casasanto, D. (2010). Space for thinking. Language, cognition and space: The state of the art and new directions, 453–478.
Cienki, A. J., & Müller, C. (Eds.). (2008). Metaphor and Gesture. John Benjamins Publishing.
Fogassi, L., & Ferrari, P. F. (2007). Mirror neurons and the evolution of embodied language. Current directions in psychological science, 16(3), 136–141.
Gould, S. J., & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation-a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology, 4–15.
Lakens, D. (2010). Abstract concepts in grounded cognition. Dissertatie reeks Kurt Lewis Instituut, 2010-3. Retrieved from http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2010- 0114-200203/UUindex.html
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things–What Categories Reveal about the Mind. University of Chicago, Chicago.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annu. Rev. Neurosci., 27,
169–192.Szwedek, A. (2002). Objectification: From object perception to metaphor creation. Cognitive
Linguistics Today, 159–175.

W jaki sposób ludzki umysł radzi sobie ze zrozumieniem pojęć, które nie występują w fizycznej rzeczywistości? Teoria ucieleśnionego poznania mówi, że ciało pełni decydującą rolę w konstruowaniu umysłu a rozumienie pojęć i zjawisk fizycznych opiera się na naszych doświadczeniach wynikających z interakcji z nimi. Dotychczas nie jest jednak zupełnie jasne w jaki sposób fizyczne doznania wykorzystywane są do tworzenia reprezentacji abstrakcyjnych pojęć - takich jak myśl czy kosmos. Badania nad mową i gestem sugerują, że mechanizmem pozwalającym na przeniesienie informacji i logiki postępowania z jednego obszaru wiedzy do drugiego jest metafora pojęciowa. Metafora pojęciowa (konceptualna) to strategia poznawcza pozwalająca na zrozumienie pojęcia docelowego poprzez odniesienia do konkretnego pojęcia źródłowego. Obecność metafory pojęciowej początkowo zauważono w badaniach językoznawczych, choć obecnie wiadomo, że występuje również w geście, filmie, reklamie czy tańcu. To dzięki metaforze ...

The theory of embodied cognition aims to explain the origin of meaning by going against the philosophical notion that thought and motor processes are independent, and can be studied as such. Cognition is considered embodied when mental processes depend on the physical body, or “when aspects of the agent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing” (Wilson and Foglia, 2011).  Proponents of this view believe that thought is influenced by sensorimotor experience (Robbins and Aydede, 2009). Empirical research within embodied cognitive science has exploded in the past decade, most notably suggesting that the relation between the body, mind and environment is not unidirectional. It is likely that physical reality shapes our perception. At the same time, it can serve as an extension of the mind, for example through epistemic actions: strategies for dealing with cognitive effort by offloading it onto the environment (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994). This paper investigates the potential of gesture as epistemic action. 12 blind and severely visually impaired children and young adults, as well as a control group of 7 seeing young adults were interviewed for the purpose of the study. Participants were asked to explain a set of abstract and concrete concepts to a computer while their speech and gestures were recorded. If gesture plays a role in reducing the mental load by externalizing thought, gestures should be produced not only for concepts that are directly embodied (concrete), but also for those with an abstract referent, with the latter possibly generating a larger gesture rate due to the increase in cognitive load. Furthermore,  the presence of gesticulation in the descriptions of not only directly embodied, concrete concepts but also those which do not have a direct physical basis produced by early and congenitally blind children and young adults would support the notion that gesture plays a role in the processing of both concept types.  This is because one could not argue that the gestural repertoire of the blind group has been acquired visually, prompting the assumption that at least part of the underlying motivation for gesture use in abstract concept descriptions is cognitive rather than communicative.
While descriptive statistics did not show that abstract concepts generate more gestures, qualitative data analysis revealed that blind and visually impaired speakers employed different gestural strategies than did their sighted peers. Notably, while sighted young adults relied on deictic, iconic and metaphorical gestures, blind and seeing-impaired participants performed iconic and metaphorical gestures as well as complete reenactments of situations. For the purpose of this paper these gesture-and-sound performances were dubbed simulation gestures, and were defined as precise reenactments of whole situations performed by the respondent in an attempt to define a given concept. The presence of simulation gestures yields support to the visible embodiment, or Gestures as Simulated Action (GSA) framework (Hostetter and Alibali, 2008), which proposes that gestures emerge from embodied mental simulations underlying both conceptualisation and language. Furthermore, such simulations resemble epistemic actions described by Kirsh and Maglio (1994) in that physical action is used to simplify a cognitive task.  A number of examples demonstrates that indeed abstract concepts in blind children are strongly grounded in their experience of real-world situations. Cautiously interpreted findings suggest that gesture should not be regarded merely as a tool for communication, but as a way of extending the capabilities of the mind, and one that is deeply rooted in physical experience. If replicated, such observations may pave the way to employing epistemic actions in education, in particular revalidation education for blind and severely visually impaired.

Recent historical conflicts, some of which are still fresh in the memory of Poznań's citizens, revolved around four ethnic/national groups: Poles, Germans, Soviets (Russians) and Jews. As many moral issues related to the country's past remain unsolved, fractures have formed in the collective memory of the inhabitants of Poznań, represented by uncertainty around the meaning of certain concepts and events. This study investigates the expression of this uncertainty through epistemic gestures such as shoulder-shrugs, head tilts and Palm-Up-Open-Hand gestures (Debras and Cienki 2012, Mueller 2004, Streeck 2009). We consider language as inherently multi-modal: during interactions, interlocutors construct meaning of verbal and non-verbal cues. Co-speech gesture adds or emphasizes information expressed in speech, and can be interpreted as a signal for the existence of focus points in discourse, guiding further analysis. In this study, we analyse data from a series of ethnographic interviews where the inhabitants of Poznań discuss the history of various ethnical groups and their impact on the city. We investigate whether speakers have a preference for a particular gesture form when expressing uncertainty, and explore the relation of gesture form with function. Quantitative analysis of the speakers' preference for gesture form is followed by qualitative analysis answering the following questions: (1) Whether there was a relationship between the occurrence of combination and simple gesture form; and (2) If combinations of gesture had been used for emphasis. We conclude that the present research sample does indicate certain interesting tendencies in the use of epistemic gestures of uncertainty, most notably speaker preferences for gesture form, and correlations between the use of simple and complex gesture. However, further research is required to verify these findings.

It may seem obvious that the events of life should be meaningful for human beings, yet there is no widely accepted theory as to how do we derive that meaning. The most promising hypothesis regarding the question how the world is meaningful to us is that of embodied cognition (cf. Turner 2009), which postulates that the functions of the brain evolved so as to ‘understand’ the body, thus grounding the mind in an experiential foundation. Yet, the relationship between the body and the mind is far from perspicuous, as research insight is still intertwined with metaphors specific for the researcher’s methodology (Eliasmith 2003). It is the aim of this paper to investigate the conceptual metaphor in a manner that will provide some insight with regard to the role that objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), plays in human cognition and identify one possible consequence of embodied cognition. The notion of emergence of meaning from the operation of complex systems is recognised as an ...

As a human product, language reflects the psychological experience of man (Radden and Dirven, 2007). One model of language and human cognition in general is connectionism, by many regarded as mathematical and, therefore, too reductive. In the course of a network simulation, however, properties emerge that were neither inbuilt nor intended by its creators (Elman, 1998), in other words, the whole becomes more than just the sum of its parts. Insight is not only drawn from the network's output, but also the means that the network utilises to arrive at the output. If then, the mechanism for concept formation, or categorisation of the world, resembles a network, it is reasonable to assume that evidence for this is to be sought in language.  Let us then postulate that there is a network mechanism for categorisation and concept formation present in the human mind and initially developed to cope with the world directly accessible to the early human (i.e. tangible). Such a network would convert external inputs to form an internal, multi modal representation of a perceived object in the brain. The sheer amount of available information and the computational restrictions of the brain would force some sort of data compression, or a computational funnel. It has been shown that a visual perception network of this kind can learn to accurately label patterns (Elman, 1998). What is more, the compression of data facilitated the recognition of prototypes of a given pattern category rather than its peripheral representations, an emergent property that supports the prototype theory of the mental lexicon (cf. Radden and Dirven, 2007). The present project proposes that, in the domain of cognition, the process of objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), would be an emergent property of such a system, or that if an abstract notion is computed by a neural network designed to cope with tangible concepts, the data compression mechanism would require the notion to be conceptualised as an object to permit further processing. Thus, an evolutionary neural mechanism is proposed for the categorisation of the world, that is able to cope with both concrete and abstract notions and the by-product of which are the abstract language-related phenomena, i.e. metaphors. The model presented in this paper aims at providing a unified account of how the various types of phenomena, objects, feelings etc. are categorised in the human mind, drawing on evidence from language.

As a human product, language reflects the psychological experience of man (Radden and Dirven, 2007). One model of language and human cognition in general is connectionism, by many linguists regarded as mathematical and, therefore, too reductive. This opinion trend seems to be reversing, however, due to the fact that many cognitive researchers begin to appreciate one attribute of network models: feature emergence.  In the course of a network simulation properties emerge that were neither inbuilt nor intended by its creators (Elman, 1998); in other words, the whole becomes more than just the sum of its parts. Insight is not only drawn from the network's output, but also from the means that the network utilizes to arrive at the output.
It may seem obvious that the events of life should be meaningful for human beings, yet there is no widely accepted theory as to how we derive that meaning. The most promising hypothesis regarding the question how the world is meaningful to us is that of embodied cognition (cf. Turner 2009), which postulates that the functions of the brain evolved so as to ‘understand’ the body, thus grounding the mind in an experiential foundation. Yet, the relationship between the body and the mind is far from perspicuous, as research insight is still intertwined with metaphors specific for the researcher’s methodology (Eliasmith 2003). It is the aim of this paper to investigate the conceptual metaphor in a manner that will provide some insight into  the role that objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), plays in human cognition, and identify one possible consequence of embodied cognition.
If the mechanism for concept formation, or categorization of the world, resembles a network, it is reasonable to assume that evidence for this is to be sought in language.  Let us then postulate the existence of a network mechanism for categorization and concept formation present in the human mind and initially developed to cope with the world directly accessible to the early human (i.e. tangible). Such a network would convert external inputs to form an internal, multi modal representation of a perceived object in the brain. The sheer amount of available information and the computational restrictions of the brain would force some sort of data compression, or a computational funnel. It has been shown that a visual perception network of this kind can learn to accurately label patterns (Elman, 1998) and form prototypes. What is more, the compression of data facilitated the recognition of prototypes of a given pattern category rather than its peripheral representations, an emergent property that supports the prototype theory of the mental lexicon (cf. Radden and Dirven, 2007).
The present project proposes that, in the domain of cognition, the process of objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), would be an emergent property of such a system, or that - if an abstract notion is computed by a neural network designed to cope with tangible concepts - the data compression mechanism would require the notion to be conceptualized as an object to permit further processing. The notion of emergence of meaning from the operation of complex systems is recognised as an important process in a number of studies on metaphor comprehension (Terai 2008, Utsumi 2005) as well as cognitive models of mind. Feature emergence is said to occur when a non-salient feature of the target and the vehicle becomes highly salient in the metaphor (Utsumi 2005). Therefore, for example, should objectification emerge as a feature in the metaphor KNOWLEDGE IS A TREASURE, the metaphor would be characterised as having more features of an object than either the target or vehicle alone.
This is investigated through a psychological experiment where 79 participants were asked to evaluate either conceptual metaphors or their components in terms of features on four seven-point scales (one of which was the „object-ness”, or tangibility of the metaphor target). The metaphor target domains were abstract concepts, and source domains were concrete, tangible phenomena. Response was measured for target words in metaphorical and non-metaphorical contexts. Statistical analysis (ANOVA) shows that there is a significant increase in perceived concreteness for the metaphorical condition, with no relevant differences across the primed and non-primed groups of subjects.
Therefore, the existence of an evolutionary neural mechanism for categorisation is carefully put forward; one that is able to cope with both concrete and abstract notions, the by-product of which are the abstract language-related phenomena, i.e. metaphors. The model presented in this paper aims at providing a unified account of how the various types of phenomena, objects, feelings etc. are categorized in the human mind, drawing on empirical evidence from a language based study.