Spatial and Linguistic Aspects of Visual Imagery in Sentence Comprehension

TLDR

Language comprehension activates mental imagery that can be motor or perceptual. The study investigates whether lexical associations alone trigger mental simulation, which linguistic elements elicit imagery, and how detailed the resulting visual simulations are. Behavioral experiments used a visual object‑categorization task to test whether up‑ or down‑related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same visual field. Results show that subject nouns and main verbs trigger visual imagery only when sentences are literal, indicating that whole‑sentence comprehension—not just lexical associations—produces imagery, and the imagery is detailed enough to specify the visual field location.

Abstract

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999; Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004; Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003; Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004; Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003; Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). This imagery can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain under-explored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements (e.g., verbs, nouns, etc.) trigger mental simulations? Third, how detailed are the visual simulations that are performed? A series of behavioral experiments address these questions, using a visual object categorization task to investigate whether up- or down-related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same part of the visual field (following Richardson et al., 2003). The results demonstrate that either subject nouns or main verbs can trigger visual imagery, but only when used in literal sentences about real space-metaphorical language does not yield significant effects-which implies that it is the comprehension of the sentence as a whole and not simply lexical associations that yields imagery effects. These studies also show that the evoked imagery contains detail as to the part of the visual field where the described scene would take place.