| Embodied theories of cognition hold that people understand language by perceptualrepresenting the situation language describing. Although few researches focus on the mentalrepresentation of implicit color information during sentence comprehension, the results arecontroversial─whether response is facilitated when the pictured object’s color matched thecolor implied by the sentence than when there was a mismatched. This paper examinesmental representation of color information in language comprehension by sentence-pictureparadigm.A hundred and three college students have participated in this study, thirty-eight inexperiment1, twenty-one in experiment2, and forty-four in experiment3. In Experiment1,offline measure was adopted, in order to explore the process of mental representing colorafter sentence integration.0ms or1500ms after reading a sentence that implied a particularcolor for a given object, participants were presented with a picture of the object that eithermatched or mismatched the implied color. Participants were required to judge whether thepictured object was mentioned in the preceding sentence. Experiment2measuredword-by-word reading as well as sensibility judgments on sentences in which a target objectword had been replaced by a picture, in order to examine whether the mental representationof color is immediately or short-lived.The reading time on picture, first word following thepicture and second word after the picture were dependent variable. In Experiment3, offlinemeasure identical to Experiment1was adopted, in order to explore the mental representationof dynamic color. It took the sentences of depicting color’s changing as materials. A sort ofsentences is changing typical color to atypical and the other sort is reversed.Using E-Prime software on Legend Computer, experiment1is2×2×2mixed design,experiment2is2×2within-subjects design, experiment3is2×2×2mixed design. All thedependent variables are analyzed with repeated measure MANOVA.In Experiment1, responses were faster in mismatched condition than in matchedcondition, at the earlier period in language comprehension. However, the result was reversedat the later period. In Experiment2, for the picture, participants’ processing speed was faster in mismatched condition. For the first word following the picture, there was a mismatchedfacilitation in the atypical color condition. In Experiment3, when the sentence impliedtypical color, people’s responses were faster when it matched the preceding context sentencethan when it mismatched at the later period in language comprehension.These findings are under the framework of embodied cognition, and provide abundantevidence for how the implicit perceptual information on object color is represented duringsentence comprehension. Together with other empirical findings, the current studyindicates:(1) If there is not enough time for cognitive processing,whether there are a matchedfacilitation or a mismatched facilitation phenomenon depends on whether two tasks competefor common cognitive resource;(2) The representation of implicit color information duringsentence comprehension is rather immediate and unlocal phenomenon;(3) In color-switchedcontext, only the typical color information is mental represented at the later period oflanguage comprehension. |
