Individual differences in mentalizing skills and their relationship to concept processing

Multiple representation theories of lexical semantics assume meaning is retrieved through simulation. However, simulation mechanisms are not well understood. Mental state inferencing – the capacity to understand mental states – has been proposed as a simulation mechanism, particularly for cognitive concepts (concepts referring to cognitive events, states, and products) ( Kiefer et al., 2022 ). In a pre-registered study, we tested this proposal using an individual differences approach. Adult participants ( n = 297) completed three measures of mentalizing skills. They also completed two syntactic classification tasks (is this word a verb; is this word a noun?) to measure semantic processing and test for the cognition effect (more cognitive words processed more efficiently than less cognitive words). We replicated the cognition effect, with high-cognition words eliciting faster and more accurate responses than low-cognition words. Additionally, we found significant interactions between mentalizing and the cognition effect: participants with stronger mentalizing skills showed larger cognition effects. This relationship suggests that mentalizing may serve as a simulation mechanism when accessing word meaning. • Word meaning is proposed to be grounded in multiple systems. • Mentalizing may be a grounding mechanism for cognitive concepts. • Semantic processing facilitated for mental-state words (cognition effect). • People differ in their capacity to reflect on their own and others' mental states. • Individual differences in mentalizing are related to the cognition effect.