This is the first study to examine the influence of gender-sex
congruence (match or mismatch between grammatical gender
markers and participant sex) on the embodied processing of
first-person sentences and images with either an internal or an
external perspective in a picture-sentence verification task in
Bulgarian modeled on Bruny e et al.’s (2009) exp erimental
paradigm. Participants were shown not to discriminate
between perspectives when the grammatical gender was
congruent with their own sex, thus allowing for an agentive
interpretation by the reader. However, in the gender-sex
incongruent condition, a significant 83 ms effect of image
perspective was observed indicating large processing costs for
attempting to adopt an internal perspective when the
p articip ant’s sex was incomp atible with the first -person
gender marking, hence with action simulation from an
egocentric perspective. These results are discussed in terms of
embodiment specificity accounts and the experiential basis of
grammar processing.