Embodied Cognition, Metaphors and Child’s Language Development

theory of embodied cognition has contributed to the emergence of hypotheses based on the idea that cognitive processes, including language, are grounded in bodily interactions with the physical world. Abstract concepts are often understood through metaphors such as “up” for happiness and “down” for sadness which we understand in an immediate way because they directly derived from our spatial experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), our bodies and their morphological features shape our ability to conceptualize. Furthermore, language abilities – when referring to actions – involve the same neural areas involved in movement (Gallese, 2008; Glenberg and Gallese, 2011). Metaphors, widely used in everyday language, are therefore naturally recruited by our sensorimotor system for abstract uses.