Abstract
Present research assessed whether action-knowledge about objects influence mental simulation in sentence comprehension. We compared the perceptual information activated by the comprehension of the sentences describing the actions that use the objects (with the knowledge about actions that bring the objects to the face) near the face (near-sentence) or far from the face (far-sentence). Results showed that participants took longer time to the comprehension of the away-sentence than to the comprehension of the toward-sentence. Word-picture verification times were significantly faster when the actions in the pictures matched the actions described in the sentences than when the actions in the pictures mismatched the actions described in the sentences. These findings suggest that action-knowledge about objects influence on-line sentence processing, and perceptual information implying sentence are activated regardless of action-knowledge about objects after sentence processing.
