Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Many theorists have argued that spatial elements could be part of the metaphoric understanding that underlies language. For example, concrete action push clearly implies a vertical motion. Richardson (2001) has shown that native participants display a high level of agreement when asked to choose or draw schematic representations or image schemas, of concrete and abstract verbs. This consistency in offline data is preliminary evidence that language invokes spatial forms of representation. Richardson (2003) adopted dual-task paradigm and found the spatial image schemas also were activated during online verb comprehension. As the materials used are sentences but not single verbs, there is an alternative explanation for the results. It could be that the effects were not primarily driven by spatial representations activated by verbs, but by representations of the whole sentence. The research was to disjoin these two explanations and explored the activation process of spatial representations during real-time comprehension of verbs. We predicted that if comprehending a verb, but not a complete sentence, would activate a spatial representation, we would expect to observe the same effects from the material of negative sentence as Richardson did, in that there is no action in the situation model of the negative sentences whose predicate was negated by “not”.

Participants listened to short sentences that included either horizontal or vertical verbs while engaged in a visual discrimination task. Experiment 1 used affirmative sentences as auditory stimuli. Participants listened to negative sentences describe objective reason in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 used negative sentences that specify protagonist’s will as comprehension material. Each trial began with a central fixation-cross presented for 1,000 ms. A sentence was presented binaurally through headphones. There was then a pause of 50, 100, 150 or 200 ms. This randomized “jitter” was introduced, so that participants could not anticipate the onset of the target visual stimulus. The target, a black circle or square, then appeared in either the top, bottom, left or right position, and remained on screen for 200 ms. Participants were instructed to identify the stimulus as quickly as possible by pressing one key to indicate a circle or another to indicate a square. Reaction times and accuracy rates were recorded.

In all three experiments, reaction times showed an interaction between the horizontal/vertical nature of the verb’s image schema and the horizontal/vertical position of the visual stimuli. The same pattern of the results suggested that verbs comprehension interacted with perceptual-spatial processes no matter the action referred by the verb was arrested by objective reason or by the protagonist’s will.

The present findings provided supportive evidence for the assertion that certain aspects of lexical meaning, both literal and metaphoric, are captured by spatial representations. Also, this evidence implied that the activation of the spatial representations from verb was not a strategic process. We argued that such spatial effects of verb comprehension provide evidence for the perceptual-motor character of linguistic representations because these spatial representations were activated during verb comprehension, and interact with concurrent cognitive and perceptual processes.

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