The cognitive sciences view concepts as the heart of cognition, yet it remains a matter of debate how we mentally represent concepts as diverse as cat, affection, and calculus. Grounded theories of representation hold that the same neural systems engaged during perception and action experience are also engaged when meaning is processed during conceptual tasks, thus providing a grounding mechanism for concepts. From an alternative perspective, corpus-based models of distributional semantics (i.e., co-occurrence patterns across language) can also capture human performance in conceptual tasks to a high degree of accuracy, which calls into question the centrality of grounding in cognition.

In this talk, I present recent work that bridges the gap between these accounts by showing that both sensorimotor grounding and linguistic distributional knowledge contribute independently to semantic cognition in both concrete and abstract domains. Rather than forming two competing accounts of representation, we conclude that both sensorimotor experience of the world and language experience of concept labels combine to provide humans with a robust, flexible conceptual system that can be accessed dynamically as needed.