Is the effect of relative embodiment on verb processing affected by the concreteness of the prime noun and grammaticality?

Abstract

Relative embodiment (RE), that is, the extent to which the meaning of a verb is related to physical movement, plays an important role in verb processing. In this study, we investigated how the concreteness of the prime noun affects the processing of high-RE verbs. We manipulated the type of word pair defined by the concreteness of the noun and the RE of the verb, and the grammaticality of the case particle linking the noun and verb. Participants decided whether the word presented after the nominal phrase was a verb or a noun. High-RE verbs paired with high-concrete nouns were processed faster than low-RE verbs paired with low-concrete nouns, although high-RE verbs paired with low-concrete nouns did not display a similar effect. Moreover, there were no interactions between word pair type and grammaticality. This result can be explained by the fact that the task was designed to focus only on verbs.