Size matters: Bigger is faster

Abstract

A largely unexplored aspect of lexical access in visual word recognition is “semantic size”—namely, the real-world size of an object to which a word refers. A total of 42 participants performed a lexical decision task on concrete nouns denoting either big or small objects (e.g., bookcase or teaspoon). Items were matched pairwise on relevant lexical dimensions. Participants' reaction times were reliably faster to semantically “big” versus “small” words. The results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms, including more active representations for “big” words, due to the ecological importance attributed to large objects in the environment and the relative speed of neural responses to large objects.

Keywords:

• Semantic size
• Visual word recognition
• Lexical decision

We thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, in particular, for identifying the three possible confounds within the materials. We are grateful to Joan Sereno and Allard Jongman for processing the sound files.