Abstract
A main challenge for theories of embodied cognition is to understand the task dependency of embodied language processing. One possibility is that perceptual representations (e.g., typical colour of objects mentioned in spoken sentences) are not activated routinely but the influence of perceptual representation emerges only when context strongly supports their involvement in language. To explore this question, we tested the effects of colour representations during language processing in three visual-world eye-tracking experiments. On critical trials, participants listened to sentence-embedded words associated with a prototypical colour (e.g., ‘…spinach…’) while they inspected a visual display with four printed words (Experiment 1), coloured or greyscale line drawings (Experiment 2) and a ‘blank screen’ after a preview of coloured or greyscale line drawings (Experiment 3). Visual context always presented a word/object (e.g., frog) associated with the same prototypical colour (e.g. green) as the spoken target word and three distractors. When hearing spinach participants did not prefer the written word frog compared to other distractor words (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, colour competitors attracted more overt attention compared to average distractors, but only for the coloured condition and not for greyscale trials. Finally, when the display was removed at the onset of the sentence, and in contrast to the previous blank-screen experiments with semantic competitors, there was no evidence of colour competition in the eye-tracking record (Experiment 3). These results fit best with the notion that the main role of perceptual representations in language processing is to contextualize language in the immediate environment.
Highlights
The notion that simulations of sensory, motor and affective representations underlie understanding of spoken and written language comprehension, typically referred to as embodiment or embodied language processing (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Meteyard, Cuadrado, Bahrami, & Vigliocco, 2012), has become an influential theoretical account of language processing
One of the four printed words was associated with the same prototypical colour as the spoken target word (e.g. FROG)
In Experiment 1 participants listened to sentences containing a critical target word associated with a prototypical colour (e.g. ‘...spinach...’) as they inspected a visual display with four words printed in black font
Summary
The notion that simulations of sensory, motor and affective representations underlie understanding of spoken and written language comprehension, typically referred to as embodiment or embodied language processing (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Meteyard, Cuadrado, Bahrami, & Vigliocco, 2012), has become an influential theoretical account of language processing. Despite its increasing popularity, many theoretical and empirical questions about embodiment remain hotly debated (e.g., Mahon & Caramazza, 2008). Ostarek and Huettig (2019) recently have put forward six challenges that embodiment research has to face in order to become a fully plausible account of language processing and cognition more generally. We will explain how the present study addresses one of these challenges, namely, to more fully understand the task dependency of embodied language processing. More than 20 years after Barsalou’s (1999) seminal paper on perceptual symbol systems, embodiment has moved in status from an outlandish proposal advanced by a fringe movement in psychology to a
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