Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The aim of this study was to examine the image-schematic representations that arise from sentences referring toconcrete/abstract action in Japanese verbs. We used a free positioning task that required the participants to draw the position ofan object in a sentence referring to an agent’s concrete/abstract action and a simple rating task that investigated the agent’s needfor body movement and emotional evaluation for the object. The results showed that the drawn object’s position in not only aconcrete but also an abstract action sentence is changed before and after the action. Further, the results indicated that the heightand distance from the agent to the object in the sentence is related to the emotional evaluation of the agent for the object in thesentence.