Epistemic action and language : a cross-linguistic study

Abstract

Epistemic actions are physical actions which increase the speed, accuracy, and/or robustness of internal computation by allowing cognitive work to be off-loaded to the environment, thus simplifying internal computation. Previous studies on epistemic action are limited in that they demonstrate that epistemic actions may only improve task performance within tasks which are inherently spatial in nature. In this regard, a cross-linguistic replication of an experiment by Maglio et al. (1999) which required participants to produce as many words as possible within five minutes from a string of seven random letters was performed in order to investigate epistemic actions in a verbal task domain.