Shape Representation of Word Was Automatically Activated in the Encoding Phase

Theories of embodied language comprehension have proposed that language processing includes perception simulation and activation of sensorimotor representation. Previous studies have used a numerical priming paradigm to test the priming effect of semantic size, and the negative result showed that the sensorimotor representation has not been activated during the encoding phase. Considering that the size property is unstable, here we changed the target property to examine the priming effect of semantic shape using the same paradigm. The participants would see three different object names successively, and then they were asked to decide whether the shape of the second referent was more similar to the first one or the third one. In the eye-movement experiment, the encoding time showed a distance-priming effect, as the similarity of shapes between the first referent and the second referent increased, the encoding time of the second word gradually decreased. In the event-related potentials experiment, when the difference of shapes between the first referent and the second referent increased, the N400 amplitude became larger. These findiings suggested that the shape information of a word was activated during the encoding phase, providing supportive evidence for the embodied theory of language comprehension.