Investigating Object Orientation Effects Across 14 Languages

Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of real objects. Evidence from sentence-picture verification tasks has shown that people mentally represent various visual properties such as shape, color, and size. However, the evidence for mental simulations of object orientation is limited. We report a study that investigates the match advantage of object orientation across speakers of different languages. This multi-laboratory project aims to achieve two objectives. First, we examine the replicability of the match advantage of object orientation across multiple languages and laboratories. Second, we will use a mental rotation task to measure participants’ mental imagery after the sentence-picture verification task. The relationship between the participants’ performance of the two tasks will provide a cross-linguistic examination of perceptual simulation processes. With the (broad) evaluation of individual mental imagery ability and potential linguistic moderators, we expect a robust estimation of match advantage of object orientation.

语言理解的心智模拟理论提出，人们能够自动构建真实物体的心智表征。来自句子-图片验证任务的研究证据表明，人们能够在心智中表征诸如形状、颜色和大小等不同的视觉属性。然而，关于物体朝向心智模拟的证据尚显不足。本研究报告了一项研究，旨在探究不同语言使用者之间物体朝向匹配优势的差异。这一多实验室项目旨在实现两个目标。首先，我们检验了物体朝向匹配优势在不同语言和实验室中的可重复性。其次，我们将利用心智旋转任务来测量参与者在句子-图片验证任务之后的心理意象。两个任务之间参与者表现的关系将提供对跨语言感知模拟过程的跨语言考察。通过对个体心智意象能力及其潜在语言调节因素的广泛评估，我们期望对物体朝向匹配优势进行稳健的估计。