Spatial Information and Representations of Word Meaning: Accessing Semantic Size during Reading

Theories of embodied cognition have proposed that language is understood through perceptual simulation of the sensorimotor characteristics of its meaning. This claim suggests the activation of sensorimotor representations is encoding-based. Participants in three eye-tracking experiments were presented with triplets of either numbers or object and animal names. When the task was to compare the referent size of the items, word and number decision times showed a symbolic distance effect, such that response time was inversely related to the size difference between the items. When semantic size was irrelevant to the task it had no effect on word encoding times. Number encoding times showed a distance priming effect: encoding time increased with numerical difference between items. Together these results suggest that while activation of numerical magnitude information is both encoding-based and goal-driven, size information associated with words is goal-driven and does not occur automatically during encoding.