Brief articleRepresenting object colour in language comprehension☆
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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This manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Jacques Mehler.