Speech utterances are phoneme sequences but may not always be represented as such in the brain. For instance, electropalatography evidence indicates that as speaking rate increases, gestures within syllables are manipulated separately but those within consonant clusters act as one motor unit. Moreover, speech error data suggest that a syllable's…

This study investigates the role of mental simulation in message formulation and grammatical encoding in two typologically distinct languages, English and Japanese. It examines relationships among physical motion, mental simulation, and sentence production, following the claims of Perceptual Symbol Systems (Barsalou, 1999) that people understand…