Abstract: Using moving window method to investigate the mode of information representation in language comprehension. Subjects were 96 university students in South China Normal University. According to whether the shape of the object in the picture was consistent with that in the sentence, the experimental materials were divided into two categories: consistent version and inconsistent version. The respond time and correct rate of picture recognition were analyzed with Paired-Samples t test. The results in experiment 1 showed that there is perceptual symbol representation in comprehension when subjects complete recognition task once after they read the key sentence. The results in experiment 2 showed that there is propositional symbol representation in comprehension when comprehension task becomes more difficult. The results in experiment 3 showed that there is also propositional symbol representation when related information is pushed into long-memory. The total results suggest that there are both perceptual symbol representation and propositional symbol representation in language comprehension, and perceptual symbol representation is only preliminary, whereas propositional symbol representation is final in human brain.

Key words: language comprehension, information representation, propositional symbol system, perceptual symbol system