Motor and auditory priming in a lexical decision task with action and sound verbs

According to embodied cognition theories, concepts are represented in sensory and motor brain systems. These sensory-motor representations can give rise to priming effects. Action verbs (e.g., to push) presumably have a higher association with motor features, and sound verbs (e.g., to buzz) with auditory features. This study assesses whether motor and auditory primes differentially influence the lexical decision of action and sound verbs. Seventy-five healthy Russian-speaking adults participated in the experiment. An online lexical decision task with cross-modal priming was administered. Participants were presented with meaningless primes such as a video clip of a moving hand (motor prime), a bike bell sound (auditory prime), or a static video clip (neutral prime). Then they saw a verb (an action verb, a sound verb, or a pseudoverb) and had to report whether or not it was a real word by pressing a button on the keyboard. Linear mixed effect models indicated no effect of the prime type on response accuracy or speed for any verb type. However, intransitive verbs elicited less accurate responses than transitive and optional-transitive verbs overall, regardless of the prime type. Moreover, participants responded slower for pseudoverbs than for real verbs. The results do not suggest differential category specific effects for action- and soundrelated verbs in a lexical decision task. However, the results for intransitive verbs support the facilitation through complexity hypothesis. Our findings do not support embodied cognition theories, but await further replication. Recommendations and future directions are discussed.