Embodied cognition, perceptual symbols, and situation models

It is difficult to see how current models of discourse comprehension can be “scaled up” to account for the rich situation models that may be constructed during naturalistic language comprehension, as when readers are immersed in the story world. Recent proposals about embodied cognition and perceptual symbols, such as those put forth by Glenberg and Robertson and by Roth might offer a framework to address this problem more successfully than traditional approaches that rely on amodal symbol systems.