An Investigation of the Amplification Mechanism of Sortal Classifiers on Mental Simulation Effects

Mental simulation effects, tested through sentence-picture verification task, suggest that understanding a sentence can reactivate related perceptual experiences, supporting embodied cognition theory. This study investigates whether Traditional Chinese sortal classifiers amplify these mental simulations during reading. Two contrasting linguistic hypotheses are explored: the coercion hypothesis and the profiling hypothesis. The coercion hypothesis suggests that sortal classifiers impose contextually compatible meanings on nouns, potentially amplifying mental simulation even when classifiers are incongruent with the inherent semantics of the noun. In contrast, the profiling hypothesis proposes that sortal classifiers highlight existing features of nouns, implying that mental simulation amplification would only occur with congruent classifiers.Experiment 1 (Amplification Test) indicated the mental simulation effects of specific classifiers and no classifiers, but only no classifiers reached significant level. Experiment 2 (Coercion Test) falsified the coercion hypothesis that no probe types cause significant effect. Given that the profiling hypothesis is yet to have positive evidence, the current findings revealed that linguistic theory needed to recognize the distinct nature of general classifiers from that of specific classifiers. In addition to the numerals and animacy of object nouns, we discussed that the nature of general classifiers should be considered in future improvement.