Embodied Semantic Effects in Visual Word Recognition

Words have meanings; on that much, psycholinguists are generally agreed. However, the issue of what “meaning” is, and why a word’s semantic content affects how easily it is recognised, are matters of less consensus. Studies of visual word recognition typically ask participants to perform one of two key tasks: deciding whether a letter string is a valid word (lexical decision), or reading a word aloud (word naming). On the face of it, one should not have to access meaning in order to perform either of these tasks: knowing that “fabric” is a real word but “fabnic” is not, or being able to pronounce it correctly, does not have an obvious semantic requirement. Nonetheless, the meaning of a word affects how quickly it can be processed. “Fabric”, for example, is recognised more quickly, and with fewer errors, than “factor”, even when other word-level variables such as length, frequency, and so on, have been controlled. Semantic effects are believed to happen in both tasks for similar reasons: active semantic content facilitates processing orthographic and/or phonological representations of the word (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004; Hino & Lupker, 1996; Plaut et al., 1996). That is, when a written word is presented, its orthographic representation spreads activation to semantic content. A word that achieves a high level of semantic activation will feed activation back to the orthographic and/or phonological representation, and facilitate a relatively rapid task response (“yes” in lexical decision; correct pronunciation in word naming). A word with a low level of semantic activation, however, will feed much less activation back to the orthographic and/or phonological representations, and facilitate the task response by only a small amount (if at all). Such semantic facilitation may not occur if the orthographic or phonological representations independently reach a sufficiently high level of activation to enable a task response. Very high frequency words, for example, may be recognised too quickly for semantic information to have a noticeable effect: as a general rule, lowfrequency words such as “cad” benefit more from semantic facilitation than do high-frequency words like “cat” (e.g., Cortese & Schock, 2013; de Groot, 1989; James, 1975). Nonetheless, the meaning of a word can play a role in early word recognition processes by mediating orthographic and/or phonological activation.1