Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 102, Issue 3, March 2007, Pages 476-485
Cognition

Brief article
Representing object colour in language comprehension

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2006.02.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Embodied theories of cognition hold that mentally representing something red engages the neural subsystems that respond to environmental perception of that colour. This paper examines whether implicit perceptual information on object colour is represented during sentence comprehension even though doing so does not necessarily facilitate task performance. After reading a sentence that implied a particular colour for a given object, participants were presented with a picture of the object that either matched or mismatched the implied colour. When asked if the pictured object was mentioned in the preceding sentence, people’s responses were faster when the colours mismatched than when they matched, suggesting that object colour is represented differently to other object properties such as shape and orientation. A distinction between stable and unstable embodied representations is proposed to allow embodied theories to account for these findings.

Section snippets

Representing colour information

Colour representation is a key aspect of perceptual information that has not received the same attention in the embodiment debate as other visual object attributes, such as shape, size and orientation (although see Chao & Martin, 1999). However, there is a long history behind the idea that object colour may be represented differently to other object properties. In the 17th century, the philosopher John Locke (1690/1975) argued for a distinction between primary and secondary object properties:

The current study

This study aims to examine whether implicit perceptual information on object colour is represented during sentence comprehension. In the experiment, participants are presented with short sentences that imply (rather than explicitly state) a colour for a particular object. Each sentence is followed by a picture and participants are asked to indicate whether the pictured object was mentioned in the sentence. For test items, the pictured object was always mentioned in the preceding sentence but

General discussion

The findings reported in this paper are consistent with the idea that language comprehension involves constructing sensorimotor simulations of a described scenario, where such an embodied representation includes information not explicitly stated. Results showed that perceptual colour information is activated during sentence comprehension even though doing so does not facilitate task performance: people responded more quickly when the colour of a pictured object mismatched the colour implied by

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Division of Psychology, Northumbria University. Many thanks to Dermot Lynott for valuable discussion, to Ben Singleton and Darren Dunning for data collection, and to anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous version of this study.

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  • Cited by (0)

    This manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Jacques Mehler.

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