Warm and Fuzzy: Perceptual Semantics Can Be Activated Even During Shallow Lexical Processing

According to the embodied cognition view, activation of perceptual semantics (such as visual information for the words "white" or "red" or tactile information for the words "warm" or "fuzzy") should occur even in a relatively shallow lexical decision task. While some studies found this activation, other studies did not. We argue that minimizing the time gap between the stimuli is crucial for detecting the activation of perceptual semantics in this task. Furthermore, we suggest that modalities should be analyzed separately due to their possible qualitative differences. We designed two experiments addressing these points in Russian (Experiment 1) and German (Experiment 2) languages. We selected visual, tactile, and auditory adjectives (e.g., "white," "warm," and "loud," respectively) and assessed lexical decision times for two stimuli at once (e.g., "white + fuzzy"), thus eliminating the time gap between the two stimuli. Our analysis accounted for word length, frequency, and shallow lexical associations between presented words. Overall, the results of both experiments demonstrated that perceptual semantics is indeed activated even during shallow lexical processing, such as in the lexical decision task. Importantly, in line with our predictions, the effect of perceptual semantics was not identical across all modalities. More specifically, there was a consistent advantage for processing visual semantics and a consistent disadvantage for processing haptic semantics. Thus, the exact combination of semantic modalities modulates the activation of modality information. Our results strongly support the embodied view of language semantics.