The Impact of Social Context and Language Comprehension on Behaviour: A Kinematic Investigation

We investigated whether and how comprehending sentences that describe a social context influences our motor behaviour. Our stimuli were sentences that referred to objects having different connotations (e.g., attractive/ugly vs. smooth/prickly) and that could be directed towards the self or towards “another person” target (e.g., “The object is ugly/smooth. Bring it to you/Give it to another person”). Participants judged whether each sentence was sensible or non-sensible by moving the mouse towards or away from their body. Mouse movements were analysed according to behavioral and kinematics parameters. In order to enhance the social meaning of the linguistic stimuli, participants performed the task either individually (Individual condition) or in a social setting, in co-presence with the experimenter. The experimenter could either act as a mere observer (Social condition) or as a confederate, interacting with participants in an off-line modality at the end of task execution (Joint condition). Results indicated that the different roles taken by the experimenter affected motor behaviour and are discussed within an embodied approach to language processing and joint actions.