The Effect Of Time Overlap Of Processing Verbs And Pictures On The Verb's Representation Of The Direction

According to the traditional view of psychology, Language stored in the brain is the abstract symbols. Language understanding is the extraction and processing of the abstract symbols. Recent years in the context of embodied cognition, more and more researchers found that language understanding is a process of mental simulation. .It is closely linked to the systems of perception and motor. Barsalou (1999) pointed out that the language in the brain is perceptual symbols, not the abstract symbols. Although many empirical studies have proved the view, but there are two different effects on the specific results:one is the match-effect ;the other is inhibition effect. On the reason of two effects, some researchers pointed out it should include the experimental procedures, experimental materials and time overlap etc. By analysis of previous studies, this research thinks the difference of experimental procedure is a form of time overlap and the reason may be related to the overlap of two experimental tasks in the processing time. Therefore, the study adopted the abstract and concrete verbs as experimental materials and the experimental procedure similar to Richardson et al (2003)'s. By controlling the presentation time of the verb, the study examined the effect of verbs of abstract and concrete and the matching of verbs'spatial representation and the location of the visual graphics on judging the shapes of he visual graphics. In the present study, the presentation time of verbs includes 150ms, 300ms and 450ms three conditions.The results show: 1) The effects of abstract and concrete verbs on judging the shapes of visual graphics have not significant difference; 2) In the conditions of 150ms, when spatial representation of verbs mismatching the location of the visual graphics, Subjects are faster to judge .In other words, there is inhibition effect; 3) In the conditions of 300ms, when spatial representation of verbs matching the location of the visual graphics, Subjects are faster to judge. It is promoting effect;4) In the conditions of 450ms, the time of subjects judging the shapes of the visual graphics does not significant difference In both match and mismatch conditions.