Activating concepts by activating experiential traces: investigations with a series of anagram solution tasks

Abstract

According to the experiential-simulations view of language, words automatically activate experiential traces that stem from the reader's interactions with their referents. Here, we focus on the corresponding influence in the opposite direction. By means of an anagram-solving task we investigated whether activating spatial experiential traces would activate the corresponding concepts, which in turn facilitates access to associated words. Participants solved anagrams of nouns associated with the ocean or the sky (e.g. dolphin = " dplhion" or cloud = " cdulo"). In six experiments we provided additional context information such as positional information (presenting the anagram at the top or the bottom of the screen), or pictorial information that either matched the ocean and sky theme or not, or both positional and pictorial information. Anagrams were solved faster when the position of the anagram was congruent with the location of the noun's referent in the real world, but only when presented on the background of an ocean-sky picture. Thus, activating experiential traces indeed seems to activate related concepts but positional information alone is not enough to find facilitation in an anagram solving task. Rather what is needed is a whole set of traces that sufficiently narrow down the number of related concepts.

Attention goes both ways: Shifting attention influences lexical decisions.

“…The present findings are in line with a recent study by Berndt, Dudschig, and Kaup (2016). They examined bidirectionality between space and concepts using perceptual cues in which anagram problems (e.g., dolphin = “dplhion” or cloud = “cdulo”) were presented at different locations in the visual field (top or bottom of the display).…”

“…Importantly, however, this effect depended on the presence of a background ocean-sky picture, suggesting that experiential traces can activate associated concepts only within a supporting context. Berndt et al (2016) therefore interpret these findings as reflecting a mixture of automatic activation processes and the integration of the context information provided by the background picture. It is unclear why a supporting context was not necessary to obtain a compatibility effect in the present studies.…”

Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production

“…These reactivations of experiential traces of space are tied to simulations of contexts or events in which an object typically appears and cannot be deduced to abstract meaning features, such as "up" or "down" (Ostarek & Vigliocco, 2017). Furthermore, spatial cues linked to situations can facilitate the accessibility of words, as has been shown in an anagram-solving task (Berndt et al, 2018). Most studies on language-space associations have focused on spatial compatibility effects where the dependent measure bears spatial characteristics, such as an upward or downward movement (Lachmair et al, 2011), thus investigating an effect of language on non-linguistic tasks.…”

“…This study was designed to test whether experientially grounded meaning aspects have an influence on which words we select when we prepare to speak and in how far they are influenced by distributional aspects of meaning. We combined the existing paradigms from the comprehension literature which show that physical visual stimulation has an influence on the processing of spatially connotated words ( Berndt et al, 2018 ; Dudschig et al, 2013 ; Kaschak et al, 2005 ; Meteyard et al, 2008 ; Ostarek & Vigliocco, 2017 ) with the evidence for automatic reactivation of spatial meaning when processing up- and down-related words and sentences ( Bergen et al, 2007 ; Dudschig et al, 2012 ; Estes et al, 2008 ; Lachmair, Dudschig, et al, 2016a ; Lachmair et al, 2011 ; Ostarek et al, 2018 ; Öttl et al, 2017 ; Thornton et al, 2013 ; Vogt et al, 2019 ). We developed a paradigm which enables us to investigate whether activations of language-space associations—for which there is ample evidence in language comprehension—can be found in language production, too.…”

Embodied language production: sensorimotor activations and interoceptive sensibility influence which words we choose when speaking

“…showing that the experimental manipulations which are meant to reactivate experiential traces need to be relevant and meaningful enough in order to influence semantic processing (Berndt et al, 2018;Ostarek & Vigliocco, 2017).…”