Temporal dynamics of the action–sentence compatibility effect

Abstract

A number of recent studies have demonstrated variants of the action–sentence compatibility effect (ACE), wherein the execution of a motor response is facilitated by the comprehension of sentences that describe actions taking place in the same direction as the motor response (e.g., a sentence about action towards one's body facilitates the execution of an arm movement towards the body). This paper presents an experiment that explores how the timing of the motor response during the processing of sentences affects the magnitude of the ACE that is observed. The results show that the ACE occurs when the motor response is executed at an early point in the comprehension of the sentence, disappears for a time, and then reappears when the motor response is executed right before the end of the sentence. These data help to refine our understanding of the temporal dynamics involved in the activation and use of motor information during sentence comprehension.

Keywords:

• Embodied cognition
• Language comprehension
• Theory of Event Coding
• Simulation
• Motor planning.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christopher Borda, Devona Gray-Hogans, Sarah Hahn, Ranezethiel Hernandez, Melissa Hilvar, Elizabeth Huamonte, Bridget Ingwell, Divya Manjunath, Jenna McHenry, Brett Mercer, Donald Moysey, Matthew O'Brien, Jamie Sorenson, Big Clay Money (aka Clayton Weiss), and Katelyn Wukovits, all of whom helped to run these experiments. Thanks to Sian Beilock and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ Errors were analysed with a Cue Presentation × Sentence Direction × Response Direction ANOVA and showed a main effect of response direction (F ₁ and F ₂ > 7.00, p  <  .05), with responses on away trials being slightly more accurate than responses on towards trials (99.5% vs. 99.0%). The interaction of Cue Presentation × Sentence Direction was significant by participants but not items, F ₁(2, 141) = 4.00, p  <  .05; F ₂(2, 78) = 1.98, p  =  .15, with participants in the 500-ms condition being more accurate when responding during away sentences than when responding during towards sentences (98.6% for away sentences, 99.3% for towards sentences), and the opposite pattern holding for participants in the 1,500-ms condition (99.4% for away sentences, 98.9% for towards sentences) and in the 2,000-ms condition (99.7% for away sentences, 99.6% for towards sentences). Given that so few participants made any errors at all (only 19% of participants made an error in responding) and that even fewer participants made more than one error (6% of participants), it is our sense that the statistical significance of these small differences reflects the extreme lack of variability in the error data rather than systematic differences in the way that participants were responding to the task.