Visual Modality' Selectivity Activation By Visual Verbs In Simple Sentence

Perceptual symbol system proposed by Barsalou is a new theory about representation of knowledge,its core viewpoint suppose that perceptual symbol is component of cognition. The theory is broadly used and gets many experimental supports in language comprehension. Apart of the experiments of the perceptual symbol system found perceptual modalities' selectivity participation.Many of this experiments show nouns' influence to perceptual modalities' selectivity participation,whereas verbs' importance in language comprehension and the close affiliation of perceptual modalities,This research want to find if visual modality's selectivity activation and visual verbs have relation in reading simple sentence.The research adopted mixed experimental designs,uses sentence-picture/word verification task,and use simple sentences,pictures and words as experimental materials.The research want to probe into visual verbs' selectivity activation to visual modality by using verbs kind and time distance as independent variable,and the response latency and right rate of judgment as dependent variable.There were two experiments,one uses the pictures as the exploration stimulate and the other uses the words as the exploration stimulate.In experiment 1,it took the pictures as the exploration,and each pair of sentences has the same subject and object.Some of the sentences have visual verbs and the others don't. When the sentence has visual verbs,subjects would represent better.And the experiment adopted two time distance that were 250ms and 1500ms,and found comparatively accordant results when using the pictures as the exploration.It can be inferred that visual modality can be selectivity startup by visual verbs,and this phenomena is durative and stability.In experiment 2,it took the words as the exploration,and used the same sentences as experiment 1.The purpose is to explore whether the visual modality can be selectivity startup by visual verbs in all time.The result showed that whether sentence has visual verb or not, there is on difference in subjects' response.It can be inferred that visual modality can't be selectivity startup by visual verbs when the exploration is word.Perceptual symbol is not the only form of information.