Abstract
Through two experiments we pursue the question of what linguistic components of action-sentences automatically activate perceptual representations employing a same-different judgment task with visual stimuli. The participants read sentences that described the motion of an object in a particular direction (toward/away and up/down), and judged whether two stimuli (of slightly different sizes in Experiment 1 or presented in different positions in Experiment 2) were identical. The results indicate that response times were significantly faster when the motion of visual stimuli matched the motion described in the sentence (match condition) than when the motion was mismatched with that described in the sentence (mismatch condition). However, response times were not significantly different between the match condition and the mismatch condition when symbol-stimuli were presented (Experiment 1). In addition, there were no significant differences in response times for first-person sentences and third-person sentences in the match condition (Experiment 2). These results suggest that perceptual representations are automatically activated during action-sentence comprehension, and these representations are activated by information about the object and its motion contained in verb phrases.
