What is up and down in embodied language processing? An experimental study on semantic priming of visual perception

Abstract Linguistic processing has been suggested to involve rich perceptual representations grounded in non-linguistic experiential content often straddling multiple modal cognitive systems. This distributed approach implies that the processing of words signifying perceptual content can interfere with other aspects of perceptual experience through cross-modal priming. In an experimental study, we investigated semantically activated cross-modal priming between perception of auditory verbs and visual motion illusions. Participants solved a lexical decision task involving concrete and abstract verbs while presented with the Motion Quartet Paradigm, a visual stimulus inducing the illusory experience of vertical or horizontal motion. We found that the semantic direction of verbs primed participants to experience the visual stimulus as moving in compatible directions (horizontally or vertically), supporting our predictions. Interestingly, and contrary to our hypotheses, the priming effect was mainly driven by abstract words. We suggest that these results might be due to the socially interactive semantics of the abstract words.