Semantic Interference and Facilitation: Understanding the Integration of Spatial Distance and Conceptual Similarity During Sentence Reading.

Ernesto Guerra,Pia Knoeferle

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00718

Abstract

Existing evidence has shown a processing advantage (or facilitation) when representations derived from a non-linguistic context (spatial proximity depicted by gambling cards moving together) match the semantic content of an ensuing sentence. A match, inspired by conceptual metaphors such as ‘similarity is closeness’ would, for instance, involve cards moving closer together and the sentence relates similarity between abstract concepts such as war and battle. However, other studies have reported a disadvantage (or interference) for congruence between the semantic content of a sentence and representations of spatial distance derived from this sort of non-linguistic context. In the present article, we investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the interaction between the representations of spatial distance and sentence processing. In two eye-tracking experiments, we tested the predictions of a mechanism that considers the competition, activation, and decay of visually and linguistically derived representations as key aspects in determining the qualitative pattern and time course of that interaction. Critical trials presented two playing cards, each showing a written abstract noun; the cards turned around, obscuring the nouns, and moved either farther apart or closer together. Participants then read a sentence expressing either semantic similarity or difference between these two nouns. When instructed to attend to the nouns on the cards (Experiment 1), participants’ total reading times revealed interference between spatial distance (e.g., closeness) and semantic relations (similarity) as soon as the sentence explicitly conveyed similarity. But when instructed to attend to the cards (Experiment 2), cards approaching (vs. moving apart) elicited first interference (when similarity was implicit) and then facilitation (when similarity was made explicit) during sentence reading. We discuss these findings in the context of a competition mechanism of interference and facilitation effects.

Highlights

One potential explanation might be that the emphasis given to the words-on-cards increased the competition of representations and/or as a result perhaps the participants’ cognitive load, resulting in spatial distance modulating sentence reading in later measures and causing competition, eliciting an interference pattern
In Experiment 1, we showed that with the same materials and a similar experimental setup (Guerra and Knoeferle, 2014), previously reported facilitation effects turn to interference between spatial distance and semantic similarity
The results of our second experiment suggest that both interference and facilitation effects can be observed even when integrability is constant. While factors such as timing and integrability might influence the dynamics of the interaction between visual and language-based representations, they do not on their own determine the direction of the effects. We argue that these factors can contribute to the level of activation of non-linguistic visual context and linguistically derived representations at a given moment, but that it is competition resulting from the activation of mental representations which elicits facilitation or interference

Summary

Introduction

Recent eye-tracking reading experiments on visually situated comprehension (Guerra and Knoeferle, 2014, 2017) have revealed an arguably more subtle interplay between representations of pictures and online sentence processing than previous studies on written (e.g., Gough, 1965; Knoeferle et al, 2011; comic books: Carroll et al, 1992; newspaper advertisements: Rayner et al, 2001) and spoken language comprehension (e.g., Altmann and Kamide, 1999; but see Cooper, 1974; Snedeker and Trueswell, 2003; Dahan and Tanenhaus, 2005; Huettig and Altmann, 2005; Weber et al, 2006; Duñabeitia et al, 2009). Whichever is the underlying cause, these modulations pose challenges for accounts of situated sentence comprehension (Knoeferle and Crocker, 2006, 2007; Altmann and Kamide, 2007; but see Guerra and Knoeferle, 2014, 2017) as they endeavor to accommodate the effects of visually-derived representations of objects (e.g., cards in Guerra and Knoeferle, 2014, 2017) They enrich the discussion about the extent (and limits) of sensorimotor interaction with language processing (e.g., Zwaan, 2014; Mahon, 2015; Myachykov et al, 2017)

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