Conceptual information about size of objects in nouns

Abstract

Two experiments provide evidence that information about the real-life size of objects is elicited by nouns. A priming paradigm was used with a category membership verification task. The results showed that targets were responded to faster when preceded by a same-size prime, and that large entities were processed faster than small ones. Overall, our results significantly extend previous work on perceptual information elicited by concepts (e.g., Zwaan & Yaxley, 2004) and, in particular, on size information (e.g., Rubinstein & Henik, 2002) by means of a size-unrelated paradigm.