Task-dependent motor representations evoked by spatial words: Implications for embodied accounts of word meaning

Embodied accounts contend that word meaning is grounded in sensorimotor representation. In support of this view, research has found rapid motor priming effects on vertical movements for words like eagle or shoe, which differ as to whether they are typically associated with an up or down spatial direction. These priming effects are held to be the result of motor representations evoked as an obligatory part of understanding the meaning of a word. In a series of experiments, we show that prime words associated with up or down spatial locations produce vertical perturbations in the horizontal movements of a computer mouse, but that these effects are contingent either on directing conscious attention to the spatial meaning of the word, or on the inclusion of the primed spatial direction in the response set, and that this is true even for strongly spatial words such as up and down. These results show that the motor representations associated with such words are not automatically evoked during reading. We discuss implications for claims that spatial representations reflect our embodied perception of the world. Introduction The meaning of spatial prepositions like above and below can influence the selection of an up/down movement. For example, the word above acting as a prime, induces faster and more accurate upward than downward responses, whereas the word below yields the opposite result (Ansorge, Khalid, & König, 2013). More surprisingly, analogous results have been reported for words like bird and submarine that, although not explicitly concerned with spatial location, nonetheless affect speeded responding in an up/down direction Barsalou, 2015). We will refer to such words for convenience as UP/DOWN words. The evidence suggests that many words, at least under certain task conditions, trigger spatial representations associated with our experiences of objects; birds are often encountered above us in the sky, whereas submarines move below in the depths of the ocean. Spatial compatibility effects induced by language are often taken as support for the claim that meaning is grounded in sensorimotor representations, including representations dealing with an object's typical location in space. For example, Ansorge, Kiefer, Khalid, Grassl, and König (2010) used a set of six spatial prepositions like above and below, and two adjectives (high and deep) as both masked primes and as targets. Subjects were required to indicate by means of an upper or lower keypress made from a neutral starting point whether target words referred to an upward or …