Tangible words are recognized faster: The grounding of meaning in sensory and perceptual systems

Abstract

Sensory experience rating (SER), a new variable motivated by the grounded cognition framework of conceptual processing (e.g., Barsalou, 2008), indexes the degree to which a word evokes sensory/perceptual experiences. In the present study, SERs were collected for over 2,850 words. While SER is correlated with imageability, age of acquisition, and word frequency, the latter variables (along with seven others) account for less than 30% of the variance in SER. Reanalyses of two large-scale studies demonstrate that SER significantly predicts lexical decision times when other established predictor variables are statistically controlled. These results suggest that conceptual processing is grounded in sensory systems. Additionally, a major benefit of this variable is that it allows psycholinguistic researchers to examine semantic–perceptual links for all word classes with a single rating.

Keywords:

• Word recognition
• Grounded cognition
• Lexical decision

Acknowledgments

Portions of these data were presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. We would like to thank Alix Haber and Rachel Santiago for data collection, Marc Brysbaert for giving us access to the British Lexicon Project data, and Jeffrey Bowers, James Adelman, and Christopher Sears for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ Due to the high correlation between objective and subjective frequency (see Table 1), we did not enter subjective frequency into the regression analysis at this level (in contrast to previous studies). However, the pattern of results remained the same when this additional variable was included.

² The same analyses were conducted using the naming data in Balota et al. (2004). SER was not a significant predictor of naming performance.

³ The motivation for including the predictors in these analyses was to be consistent with earlier published work (e.g., Balota et al., 2004; Cortese & Fugett, 2004; Cortese & Khanna, 2007). Of course, there are other variables that may influence reaction time. When we included additional control variables in the hierarchical regression (including phonological neighbourhood size, regularity, nonlinear frequency, and the frequency by regularity interaction), the general pattern of effects for SER does not change. Spelling–sound regularity was determined using Davis's (2005) N-Watch program, and nonlinear frequency was modelled by including the second-degree polynomial for word frequency (see Brysbaert & New, 2009). SER is still not a significant predictor of naming performance (ps > .5), but predicts lexical decision time in the Balota et al. (p < .01) and BLP (p < .05) datasets, as well as lexical decision accuracy in the BLP (p < .01).