Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study explores the difficulties in physically realizing linguistic instructions concerning the action of jumping.We carried out a questionnaire on the understandability and physical feasibility of various jumping actions in Japanese, andthen conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to jump according to these instructions. After the physicalperformances the participants were asked to rate the easiness of the actions in a second questionnaire, and the results of thetwo questionnaires were compared. The results show that the understandability of the instructions and the participants’ beliefsabout the physical feasibility of the instructions were closely correlated. However, the results of the two questionnaires did notcorrelate. The results suggest that although participants believe they can convert jump instructions into physical performancesif the instructions are easy to understand, there are some gaps between the understandability of the linguistic instructions andthe physical realization of them.